Single player mode

Someone mentioned yesterday that the game doesn't really have a single player mode. I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that a lot of features aren't implemented yet, but I kind of agree and think it's worth having a discussion about.

For me, I'm more interested in single player mode than I am in multiplayer. The main reason I play computer games is to switch off from human interaction and just have time to become engrossed in something I do on my own. Now I'm enjoying having the chat system and helping out friends, and finding other people's towns and trading and such. But it's so inbuilt into the game I have a hard time imagining what single player mode would look like.

For a start, single players might not want to see the chat screen. For me, I find it distracting and though I know there's an option (currently broken) to switch off notifications of friends entering/leaving the game, having the chat screen doesn't make you feel like you're alone playing by yourself.

The friends option for building is somewhat easy to get around: just don't have any forum friends. But trading and battles can't easily be done in single player mode, though I assume future planning may include quests and things that can be created for computer-human playing.

The world map itself would be impossible to do as a single player, because that defines a huge part of the expansion and building goals.

I can see how you can diminish certain ways of playing but again it comes back to: does this feel like switching off from all other contact and being engrossed in the game? And I find myself struggling to see how I might be able to play without feeling like I'm part of a massive player group.

Perhaps I was misunderstanding what Enkord meant by 'single player' or perhaps it's because it's too early to tell... but I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on this as I'm sure it would also make for good feedback to them too.

PS. Whoever it was who said it in chat, please add your thoughts too!

As far as i know enkord never plan to make TT2 as a stand alone single player game again. Since start it was planned as free multiplayer with a cashshop. Maybe somebody thought it would be the same as the original TT but in this case he is wrong. So what is the question here?

Nice to see such a discussion. As a big fan of TT i was following every news for years. TTG was so amazing (it's only some features new, but as i have played TT so often, the newly added things was soo amazing!), and than i heard of TT2. First impression: YEAH! Second impression after somenews: YEAH! Third impression after i played it for 6days: It's okay. --- But i'm not only a fan, i've worked as a game designer, game analyst and programmer for years.

IMPORTANT HINT: The following text is quite large and is more like background info about the real answer. If you are lazy and/or don't want to read a so long opinion, then you can scroll complety down and get the answer to the thread-questions :). --- And sorry for mistakes, don't want to double check, as it is 8am here and i'm really tired.. most are working now.

The fact thats an online multiplayer game don't shocked me. But now i see what it is like.. there are only two things that can destroy the fun: 1) Cash shop (after you checked it's a pay2win game) and 2) waiting time (after you come only less frequent) --- All other things are not round yet, but at the actual stage i would say that it will be at later stages.

Start with the first one: The cash shop is necessary for the game to make money, as it will be free (or it will be monthly payed(?), such an idea was mentioned in the alpha-testing review webpage). I know so much games with shops, and only a few do it right. As an example Guild Wars 2. Somebody may know that game.. you NEVER need to go to the shop. And the game expands and expands.. they have hired new teams and adds content in a two-week cycle. So no one can say: They will lose much money. They have other issues...

But back to the shop: There are two needs on the shop: a) You need fully access to all content without paying money and b) prices for items should be not to high, as it looks like a "greedy money-vampyr".

At the moment a) is complety nice in totem tribe. If you dont want to, you dont need to pay - with one exception: If you want to level up your hero. You CAN level up with much waiting time, but whoever wants to wait for 3 days, where you roll a statue of enlightment at the roulette-thing? Only for on level from 7 to 8. From 8 to 9 you need 4 and so on. (For player doesn't know that fact) --- but i think the hero system will be rewritten anyways. But only to say: Thats a thing, player who pays much money will be better than everyone else!

The b) thing is ... everyone can have other feelings, but in my opinion the prices could all be lowered and that would make more people to pay. At the moment the most money is a "donation", most people done it to come very early into the alpha stage. Buy NOW more enkord cash? I'm one of the people who calculates in my currency and check: Am i willing to pay X€ for an item what give me Y effect? And then there will be only a few items where there come out a "TRUE" value. A fast example: I need three statues of enlightment for one level up: It will cost me 3$. Next level will me cost 4$ and so on ... would i want to pay it? Haha never. (To repeat myself: I believe that system will be revamped and you can get the statues through quests maybe. You don't need to buy everyone.. but if you do, you can be now level 17 or more)

One fact should be mentioned: Thats the first game i ever played where you get MASS of payed-items. Do i need the items? Nope, i would like to get the enkord cash sum .. but it's a present and thats nice.

Conclusion: At the moment i only would say, that the prices are too high (but i can live with it, if they stay as they are, but i would never pay at the finished game...).

Now the 2nd big topic, the waiting time. (We all must have in mind thats an alpha, and in later stages it could complety be changed!)

What do i mean with waiting time? Every second a player waits and could go offline. As i mentioned in another thread already: Between the tutorial and the first quest-location there is so much time (i think 3 days for a normal people) you do only upgrades.. the most time 6 - 30 minutes per building. Maybe there will be side-quests added later, or better there will be small quest between tutorial and the hideout. The other thing is the waiting time for buildings.. it raise with more people, i don't see logic behind that fact. The "game logic" is make every building wastes longer times.. but the REAL LOGIC? More people in town and the worker getting worse. The other fact: Payed waiting line.. thats a combination of (1) and (2) --> the costs are too high that i EVER will use it. In TT there was a waiting line.. but every night before i go to sleep, i prayed for two waiting lines, one for the research and one for the buildings. And now? It comes true, but now you cannot use the "waiting line" feature, you only can reasearch AND building one at a time. For the research its okay, but the buildings? Not even 2 buildings? And here comes the accumulate feature like the hero level up: If you want to add one building to waiting line you need 1 hammer. If you want to add another one you need 2 hammer.. and so on. The first thing i want to do is: Upgrade all mines (fourteen) get something to eat and come back after 60 mins...... thats the next thing i will pray for every night before i go to bed. So what next? Oh yeah, the waiting time for a specified building. I don't can see what the point is here... if there will be ever a building with more than 48h building time, i can say, that i never will play that game after its release. But if i see what time the buildings need in the stone age, i don't want to know how long it needs at the last age. Some building with 1 week build time? Or 20 days? There will be for sure upgrades versions of the hut.. if they starts with the timing from hut 5, then it is possibly to have 20 days for last hut-typed-building to make it level 5.

What i really like: Hard to find items, very hard puzzles --- if you search for hours for a solution, its nice, as if you succeed it, you will get a "yeeehaa"-feeling. But there should be hints, or the puzzle should be really clear what need to be done.

Conclusion: At the first two days i've played, i was online for around 48h with only a few hours of sleep. Only to get to the quest location, get as a first player the 2nd town and so on ... but even if i don't succeed it, another two days for the next quest location, i wouldn't do that. The big difference between TT and TT2 is: Now i only need to build one city for every quest location. But if you compare the times, i would really like to build new building for every quest like it was in TT. Now i need more time for the first quest, as i need to play TTG completly.

One last thing to mention, as it is fitting perfectly in here:

Berserker said in another thread: "And since major demographic in game's target audience are adults that usually don't have a lot of spare time, we need to design the game with this in mind."

As i'm myself in that target audience, and 7 other people i've shown (till now) that game, no one of these was happy to see a multiplayer online game with real time. I don't know whoever picked that target audience, but maybe i don't think of the same people as enkord think. I can only say what somebody said (which have played TT more often than myself, but doesn't know TTG.. about that he was very happy!): An online game? If i come back from work, i only have 1 or 2 hours time, i have kids, i have a wife, while i'm offline they do harlem shake with my city. I never will play it...

But i can say, as 4 of the 7 people not even know TTG... they are happy, but not about TT2. No one of my 'real friends' who played TT would like to play TT2. --- I think target audience should be more like school teens, which have half a day time. Everyone with private life cannot build so fast and will be sooner or later disappointed. Or they will use the hard earned money to use the "pay2win" concept. Maybe thats the reason why the aim is "adult".

Last words: All the things are only my opinion, and can be quite different from every gamer. It doesn't mean the game is bad or something like this. But i have some doubt if i really play that game till the end. I don't know any game which is perfect.. and thats why i say what i think. Enkord can use it or ignore it. But i can say: I've tried my best to make my point clear. It's good to know why people would leave a game.

Answer to the main question: Definitly it would be much nicer if its like a singleplayer game. If I can play if i want to, if the game don't tell me "you must now go to bed, in 8h your building is finished".

Maybe i will make a thread with suggestions, how to make the acutal game nicer, without to change the system at all. There are some ideas flows through my mind.... mhh.. but for now i think, that there are game designer who get's payed for that.

Thanks for everyone who reads this and hopefully the important people will read this :-)!

PS: If u think "Whats wrong with you?! *angry*" you can take your frustation and attack me ingame.. need something exciting there.

As far as i know enkord never plan to make TT2 as a stand alone single player game again. Since start it was planned as free multiplayer with a cashshop. Maybe somebody thought it would be the same as the original TT but in this case he is wrong. So what is the question here?

(also a reply in part to Anneer)

It was quite clearly discussed in the beginning that there would be a single player option, for those who wish it. Perhaps I misunderstood what Enkord defines as "single player" but it was indeed mentioned (and exists somewhat in the FAQ) that single player will be possible. Obviously original discussions didn't reveal a lot, so again, it could entirely be a misunderstanding. The majority of what I remembered from the teasers and news updates meant that "be online all the time" was the biggest thing and that although there would be multiplayer features it was never suggested (and again, maybe it was meant to be) that those would be stuff you couldn't switch off in single player mode.

Here's the old news: http://www.totemtribe.com/news/totem-tribe-2-will-support-multiplayer/

Other than that, I was mostly sharing my point of view and experience. I think mostly all this means is that Enkord should not describe the game as single player also, but rather multiplayer with the ability to scale back interaction if you wish. Not so much a question as a suggestion I guess. I really don't see the game as single player at all, which is disappointing because a lot of Enkord's FAQs and discussions suggest that you can indeed play that way.

I guess the sum is that if people see "you can use single player mode" then they will be disappointed very quickly. To most people single player is not "there's a chat box, and trading, and battles, and friend's help, but you can ignore it if you want".

@Suncheck

Do you mind if I move your comments to a separate thread? I think you make some good points that are worth discussing further but think they probably deserve their own space rather than being off-topic here.

Yes, probably it's a misunderstanding, perhaps I wan't able to communicate clear enough. I said the game could be played in single-player fashion, not a separate game mode where noone able to interact with you. And it is indeed possible to play it kinda like original game, because unlike typical online games we have single-player quests and story which you will be able to dive into, without caring about neighbors or other players.

The mode are you talking about is probably what I meant when explained Communality vs Leaderism. The former is meant for casual single-player oriented people and it increases your defenses greatly so it will be easier for you to focus on single-player quests and not suffering much from external attacks.

I do agress the chat and interaction is a bit in-your-facce at the moment, but since the interface will be significantly reworked, it will be fixed anyway + enough options to limit your interaction. Plus general chat willl not be so flooded in final game as it will require items to write there to limit the flood of messages. Currently it is not limited for obvious reasons.

I think the misunderstanding came about due to expectations. I was expecting something like TT1, so I was also expecting that multiplayer would sort of be an 'add on', not the main feature. I really hope you reword the FAQ and your advertising materials to make it clearer that that 'single player mode' is not something where you play separate to everyone else; that 'single player mode' is just a scaled back version of multiplayer.

To most people I expect they will read communality vs leaderism as separate from the issue of multiplayer vs single. I know when I read it I just assumed that you could play peacefully against the game itself, or have more battles against the game itself. The way you mean it though, it is peacefully against other people or battles against other people. Again that's not the same thing as being off on your own playing against the game only.

Glad to hear the interface will be reworked. It's really rather distracting seeing who is popping in and out of the game. (Though I'm liking the chat itself, that part of it is annoying)

The border line is too thin. The quests are purely single-player experience and if you play them and building your town without opening up the chat and asking friends to help, does it really that much of a multiplayer game?

Yes, the quests are. But the expansion isn't. Nor are the battles. If someone attacks me even though I'm minding my own business, that's not single player mode. Even with communality there's no guarantee no one will attack. I can also see people expanding around me, which means that I can also see that there are people to compete with for global resources or simply room to build.

I guess the trading can be ignored though.

But for me it just comes back to what I see. I see other players around me. I can see them expanding. I can see that they're doing stuff. And that breaks the whole "single player mode" idea for me.

I get what you're saying and I think it's more than likely just a difference of opinion as to what constitutes playing by one's self. I opened this thread mostly because after someone said it in the chat I realised "hey yeah, this doesn't feel like single player to me". I don't mind playing this way I just think that more care should be taken to explain to people it's not actually like TT1, where there's no interaction at all; instead it's more like multiplayer minus some stuff that reduces the interaction but doesn't remove it entirely.

I am with you on the neighbours issue Buckwheat.  Not just because of getting blocked in which is an issue all on its own, but also with regards to the feeling that when you log in you realize that you are not alone and that there are plenty of people playing along with you when all you want is to immerse yourself in the game without being interrupted by the outside world.  I have also noticed that when you realise that there is no hope of your country gaining natural resources (spices, wine, wool etc) the global map becomes less interesting, unless of course you're prepared to go into battle and fight for them, which I'm not.
The single player issue though really is all down to interpretation of what Berserker has said over the last few years on the forums.  I was actually not surprised when I played the game first,  it was in my opinion, what Berserker told us it would be. A combination of multi and single player gaming, with the quests being the single player aspect.  I played Goblin Keeper for about a year (the one and only MMORPG I have played).  Initially it was a PVP game but they then decided to tweak it so that you could mark your dungeons as a PVP gamer if that was the type of game you wanted to play most.  Of course this didn't mean that your dungeon couldn't be raided if you aren't a PVP but it very very rarely happened. This meant that those who enjoyed the building and expansion gameplay were able to get on with that while those whose dungeons were marked for battle fought it out amongst themselves and enjoyed what they were doing.  Maybe this is something that could be looked at and tweaked to suit TT 2.

Here's the old news: http://www.totemtribe.com/news/totem-tribe-2-will-support-multiplayer/

I think berserker said nothing wrong there. Im with him to say somebody misunderstand the single-player part of the game even if you will have tt so hard in mind. For sure its hard to discribe TT2 because its a mix of different genres. I see tactical parts at the multiplayer-map expanding, i see hidden object inside the towns and special places, i see RPG in charakter-creation skilltrees and herodevelopment, i see adventures with some of the quests, i see building strategy in townmanagment.

The problem of a stand-alone-game is you will have fun to play it maybe.After some days you reach last goal and you throwaway it. If you really had fun maybe you replay it different times. The difference to a multiplayer-game isn't just the interaction of the players. Its the whole point of the community. Primary you friends/alliance you will found. There comes a point you don't play the game not just for your own fun, its also because to communicate with others. Often i spend more time to do things with the community instead of just clicking the right button for the game.

@Suncheck

Do you mind if I move your comments to a separate thread? I think you make some good points that are worth discussing further but think they probably deserve their own space rather than being off-topic here.

I don't think you should move his reply, although he is talking about much more than the single player issue, I think it is probably one of the most pertinent and intelligent reading I had on this forum ever...no offense to anyone. if you are going to move it, you are going to loose some of the context for the following replies.

The problem of a stand-alone-game is you will have fun to play it maybe.After some days you reach last goal and you throwaway it. If you really had fun maybe you replay it different times. The difference to a multiplayer-game isn't just the interaction of the players. Its the whole point of the community. Primary you friends/alliance you will found. There comes a point you don't play the game not just for your own fun, its also because to communicate with others. Often i spend more time to do things with the community instead of just clicking the right button for the game.

So what you are saying is that the only way that we "die-hard TT players" can play unlimited TT is to play on a multi-player forum. Otherwise, our game just ... ends.

@Suncheck

Do you mind if I move your comments to a separate thread? I think you make some good points that are worth discussing further but think they probably deserve their own space rather than being off-topic here.

I don't think you should move his reply, although he is talking about much more than the single player issue, I think it is probably one of the most pertinent and intelligent reading I had on this forum ever...no offense to anyone. if you are going to move it, you are going to loose some of the context for the following replies.

I only suggested it because I have a very long reply drafted and I'm not sure everyone wants to read such a long thing in what is essentially an off-topic post. I just thought it might be easier to split the single-player discussion from the speed/shop discussion. But then, that's why I asked: some of the context is important.

I was actually not surprised when I played the game first, it was in my opinion, what Berserker told us it would be.

The problem of a stand-alone-game is you will have fun to play it maybe.After some days you reach last goal and you throwaway it. If you really had fun maybe you replay it different times. The difference to a multiplayer-game isn't just the interaction of the players. Its the whole point of the community. Primary you friends/alliance you will found. There comes a point you don't play the game not just for your own fun, its also because to communicate with others. Often i spend more time to do things with the community instead of just clicking the right button for the game.

Er, yes. But you describe the game as multiplayer. Which is exactly my point. Terminology is important and I think if this game were to be described as multiplayer then it would fit "interaction of the players" and "friends/alliance" and "communicate with others". That describes the game well. If one were to describe the game as single player, using your same words, I think you would insist that the description doesn't fit the name or vice versa. Playing with others does not equal playing by yourself.

While I agree that community can be fun, I also want to reiterate that most of the games I play, I play on my own because I want to be on my own. If I wanted to play along with other people I would choose multiplayer games. I don't. Having said that, there's nothing wrong with the game the way it is, once again I am more stating that I don't think it matches the description and that there's nothing wrong with simply saying "you know what, it's multiplayer. Get used to it" instead of trying to force single player mode on an idea that clearly fits multiplayer better.

This is just my opinion as one who actively avoids multiplayer games purely because I don't want to interact with other people. (This game overcomes that only because it combines aspects of gameplay in a fine balance that makes it more enjoyable for me than most. I'm also enjoying the multiplayer aspect, but that doesn't change the fact that once I thought about it I went "yeah, this isn't really what I thought single-player-mode would be like and I don't know how they would implement one".)

Again, I want to state, I'm not arguing for more single player features, but rather arguing for better and clear language by Enkord when describing what their game is.