Nintendo wants to address privacy concerns of players who want to play massively online role-playing games (MMORPGs) but without having to interact with other human players in an open world setting.
According to a published patent from earlier today, MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Second Life feature massive virtual environments where human-controlled players are forced to interact with each other to directly impact the said open world and hence progress.
Nintendo here wants to create a system which allows players to still play, enjoy, and impact the online world but without any human-based interactions involved. That also means quests where a group of human-controlled players have to work together will function the same way except that a single player will not interact with other participating human players.
While it sounds like an oxymoron, Nintendo has come up with a way to create a single-player game in entirety within an online role-playing game.
This is a game idea that lets players play a single player game with the benefits of playing with other people without having to physically interact with other people.
Players are fully affected by everything that happens in the game world in the same server that they share.
Nintendo believes that such a system will cater to players who “do not want to deal with other people” and who will “appreciate the privacy it provides.” As such, an MMORPG featuring such a system will play out the same way regardless of whether players physically interact with each other or not.
The filing though does point out a few exceptions. For example, single-player-opting players can still choose to physically interact in their favorite MMORPGs but with only friends or players who have been authorized beforehand such as players added to a friend list of sorts.
Hopefully, Nintendo will be allowing players to toggle such an option on the fly so as not to be permanently stuck in a single-player game within a massively online role-playing world.
