Could making a "tycoon" game single-player by default potentially kill it?

Help and Feedback Art Design Support
#1

I’ve been working on a sandbox farming game for a few months and a single aspect of the game has been bothering me since the very beginning: There can only be one farm/tycoon per server because of the sheer amount of parts, NPC logic complexity and gameplay mechanics.

The game uses private servers so a player has his own server for his farm and is able to invite his friends to play.

Now back to the question stated in the title:

Could the fact that a player is alone in his server by default negatively affect his attention span despite having the ability to easily invite and visit other players?

When looking at most tycoon games, communication between players is very rare. However, the fact that a player has nothing to look up to except what he does himself might push him to play something else. When I was younger, I often visited other players’ tycoon to see what I could potentially achieve if I kept playing.

Here are a few systems I implemented to remedy this issue:

  • Public town: Players can easily travel to a public town where they can meet other players
  • Visit friends’ farm: Players can easily travel to their friends’ farm whether or not they’re online due to player-managed permissions
  • Visit a random online player’s farm: Similar to the previous point, the difference being that the player can visit a random farm where the owner is present

Any thoughts?

(Let me know if this is posted in the wrong sub-category, I can’t find one that fits this subject)

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#2

Voile, in my opinion it all depends on the user. Some want to play with friends, which you have covered with both the town and visiting their friends aspect of the game. But overall, if the game is really good. I won’t care if I was doing it by myself. Just knowing that people could potentially come visit my area would hook me to the game. Plus like above, if you’re feeling alone you have had a place on which they can be sociable.

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#3

Have you considered making a global chat system where players can chat with some other players playing the game? You could also perhaps make some sort of in-game groups for farmers to join together and then each group has its own chat too. These chat systems would allow players to continue communicating with each other as though they were in the same game server.

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#4

I didn’t consider making a global chat system and that’s actually a great idea. I’ll definitely look into it once universe scripts come out.

I could also do a group/community system like you said and implement it in the global chat.

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