How will 3G networks change mobile game design? This case study has a few suggestions beyond the normal “you can play Doom with your friends!”. One point made is that “you can now build real client-server mobile games with the expanded bandwidth and speed on 3G networks, and you can put plenty of game content on the server, including new levels, textures, audio and so on. Bellows’ company Floodgate Entertainment did a similar thing on 2G networks with its adaptation of BioWare’s NeverWinter Nights, which had around 1.5MB of content that downloaded to the game while playing to allow a bigger player experience. On 3G, it’s contended, you could possibly download tens of megabytes”. This allows the games to be far more complex…forget vertical levels what about horizontal ones? Of course, it’s also pointed out you need flat rate billing plans for this to really take off…
I also liked the design of the game, the theme of which allows it to work with slow network speeds. “Since the title is an online pirate ship combat title, even with latencies of 250ms to 1000ms, the cannon attacks that the game uses have inherent game design latency – the projectiles are not necessarily fast, and there’s time for the ships to reload. This built-in latency in the game does not fix some problems with ships ‘warping’ and popping to other locations on slower 2G networks, but with 3G, at around half of that latency, the game works excellently”.
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–3G Games รข
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