Then it goes back to difficulty with world changing/reacting events. Also if you allow persistent timelines then how do you explain what your character is doing when you're not playing (but someone else's is)? You start having to cludge things like saying they are 'staying in an inn'. Conveniently. And they didn't come out when the world was cast into darkness through the actions of X. To avoid cludges you end up reducing the scope until you end up being left with local and temporary reactions and you've lost the hero scope altogether.I see what your saying, but what about if they could do whatever they want and you could as well? The world is just shared, you don't even have to be on at the same time. This of course would require a world that is sufficiently big enough to handle that(think daggerfall) but I think the potential for self contained rpg multi worlds would be great.
Mechanically it's not easy either. Take item clutter for example - one of the great things about a good single player game is the ability to play about with thousands or more of objects, to rearrange them how you like and have it persistently remain in the new state. That is a lot of things to track, and one of the reasons save games can end up large as they either have to save the altered game save states or track changes to a default game state. Introduce more players and you now have to synchronise that data.. so you have to stick a master copy on a server instead. Ditto the game world/quest states if you want people to be playing asynchronously. Now, how do you handle persistent timelines? Keep the server running? What if it crashes/needs to reboot?
Those things can all be overcome, but they each introduce compromises.
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