THE EV/O MULTIPLAYER PESSIMISTIC REPORT
I'm not sure if anyone has ever mentioned this before, but a multiplayer EV/O game, while it would be extremely fun at first, would have its charm wear off slmost as quickly as EV and EVO do without plug-ins, for the sole reason of plug-ins.
For people playing multiplayer EV/O to use plug-ins, the ability to create a 'room' of sorts would be required, where people with a certain plug-in get together to play it. This would probably require some sort of screening program, in which anyone without the plug-in would be ejected; otherwise, several people's computers could glitch up, even potentially crashing every other 'room' (depending on who is hosting the room, an individual, or Ambrosia)
The penalty of not being able to play plug-ins with EV/O-MP would be a serious hindrance, since plug-ins are the only reason the games have stayed alive as long as they have. Creating plug-in support for multiplayer would take a whole lot of work, and no one person could do it.
Another problem: the concept of time. Because of the hyperspace jump time extensions of larger ships, what would happen? A real-time approach would be extremely complex (if not impossible), and a turn-based approach would probably ruin the fun of the game.
As someone (I don't know who) mentioned before, somewhere (I can't remember where), it might be feasible to create multiplayer with a single system, no time penalty for landing on planets (there would only be one or two anyway), and a whole bunch of ships just blasting each other (not too different from the "Arena" plug-in for EV). While death and destruction are some of the most fun elements of EV/O, the lack of missions and environmental vareity would make it very boring very fast.
What happens when two or more people take the same mission? In many cases, this wouldn't cause a problem, but what if it's a big political mission, like destroying an enemy government? And what about mission bits that change the galaxy - do they change it for everyone, or just the person that accomplished it? The latter wouldn't be different from single player EV/O.
As I've pointed out, EV/O-MP has several obstacles in front of it (and probably more that I haven't mentioned). I think the closest thing we'll get to it is a pencil/paper RPG played by e-mail, over a bulletin board, or in a chat room; however, this destroys the visual effects, etc. Sadly, it is my belief that EV/O-MP will never come to fruition (at least, not by our great-grandchildren's lifetimes), and we may as well put it aside. Normal plug-ins are still entertaining, and while competing with humans instead of Artificial Stupidity would be nice, it's just not going to work. We'll just have to wait until Ambrosia's next space sim, to see if that'll be multiplayer.
(I'm not implying that they have another space sim in the works, it's just a prediction.)
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"I don't know, Marge; trying is the first step towards failure"
-Homer Simpson
