The title explains it all. I want to make a game with magic spells to battle with. Should it be PVP (Player vs. Player) or PVC (Player vs. Character)?
- PVP
- PVC
0 voters
PVP, one, it’s less hard to script, and two, it’s more fun/enjoyable.
3 Likes
I would say you could add both, it would be good to add quests to fight NPCs and get rewards so you can have a longer average visit length on your game because theres more to do than just fighting it out with other players.
4 Likes
My opinion on this comes down to how you would implement it. If you have simple NPCs that just come towards you and “attack” you then PVP but if you put in time and effort to have decent NPCs that fight more like a person would, I would say NPCs would be better. On the other hand, PVP can be poor if it’s just luck base or requires knowing cheap shot tricks to kill others. The other issue with PVP is that some games may implement it in a way where once you pass a certain level, lower levels can’t kill you and they camp new player spawns and kill them, making it frustrating for the new player to start off. At the end of the day, it’s all about how you would implement it.
2 Likes
If you implement it right, PVC can be better than PVP, though having both might be smart. If you just have a NPC walk towards you, it looks really cheesy, but a full-blown AI which reacts like a Player would be amazing.
2 Likes
If I were you I would go for both, so that it will attract players that like ethier(< did I spell that right) one to your game.
2 Likes
Players are more engaged with Player vs Player matches, which encourage them to be more competitive to get the most wins (if you have a global leaderboard showing the wins, etc.)
But Player vs Computer? It gets boring pretty quickly if the Computer difficulty remains the same difficulty every match.
1 Like
Player vs Player is easier to implement and is preferred.
Player vs NPC requires a behavior tree of some sort, hard to implement if your system is complicated.
There isn’t a better option, each game is on a spectrum. Either all battles are done PvP OR all battles are done with an NPC OR a game that uses both with a scale of preference.
NPC battles are hard to pull off, if you aren’t confident in scripting and designing yer better off relying on PvP since it is widely preferred in the community. Notice how most games that involve battles doesn’t have NPCs? It is because those are hard to implement and be successful.
Statistic Training method for creating NPC behavior
You can program a Reinforcement Learning neural net if you want interesting behavior from your NPCs, you can tweak and change the reward and penalty for NPCs to have “personalities”.
You might increase the reward for attacking directly,meaning that the AI will most likely be agressive.
Or reward cowardice. Up to you, this makes NPCs feel somewhat human too and is best if in a story environment.
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There isn’t a right answer to this question as the question itself is widely ambiguous. If you’re looking to develop a concept based on what kind of play style you adopt, that’s probably going about it the wrong way. PvP and PvE each have their own respective circumstances where they’re preferred for the theme or idea of the game and neither is necessarily better than the other.
No one can really decide how you create your game for you. Make the choice yourself: do you want to have players be able to attack each other, or maybe only be focused on killing enemies? Maybe you want both? Think about what you would choose and why you think it’d fit your game.
If you’re asking for an opinion as to which play style is more preferred, this question would make more sense. If you want my two cents on that question, I prefer PvE much more. PvP games typically tend to be very competitive and spawn a lot of toxicity moreso than PvE games (not implying PvE is free of it either: it’s definitely there). This usually means players have a bad experience because of other players and it causes losses in many regards up to session time, retention and monetisation.
PvE games means players can take things easy and focus on fighting other enemies at their own pace as well as craft their own adventure either by themselves or with other players. They don’t have to worry about end-game players using highly overpowered equipment to kill players for entertainment or whatever. You can also expand quite a lot on the game’s narrative this way.
While high-end players killing low-end players is really a solvable problem, it’s not a non-problem. Games don’t often add scaling, passive modes (e.g. safezones, invulnerability until performing an attack action) or a floor of some kind (e.g. you can only attack players ± 100 levels your own, level <25 players can’t do PvP). When a new player is getting killed constantly by other players who’ve played longer, that generates frustration and doesn’t make things very fun or easy to get into.
Speaking from experience. Somewhat of a rant but something to keep in mind as well.
3 Likes
PVP. There is not a lot of PVC games but that is because not a lot of people like to play against bots.
1 Like
PVC + PVP
PVC for when servers are empty and so you can monetize something
PVP for high action so players can use the things they grinded for
There is nothing more boring than a game with too much action, or too little action. For me PVC provides low action and PVP provides high action. Giving both gamemodes will also balance out your playerbase.
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PVP would be easier but if there is a person creates a PVC he would have to be a genius and if he shares how he does it, automatic battles would be easier and cooler things would be created in fights
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PvP, I find it way more fun to play with friends than to play against robots.
1 Like