Designing multiplayer rpg games for PC and mobile

So I've been watching titles that try to target both PC and mobile. The one that is closest to what I'm making would be Albion Online.

My gut reaction early on was their approach is probably just hurting more then it helps. That's a complete educated guess btw. But they have said less then 10% of their player base is mobile. And their controls are very limited due to trying to work well on mobile.

I'm thinking what might work better, is to just have a mobile play experience that is a subset of what you have on the PC. Take what works well on mobile and expand on that if needed. And not have the limitations on the PC side.

Generally, I was thinking take most of the micro management/crafting/economy stuff and make a good mobile ui for that. The basic idea being when you want to actively play say doing guild battles or something, you can do that on the PC. And a lot of the rest you can just keep up with on mobile.

One thing I should say about this specific game is that you have up to two companions, plus you can have hirelings. Plus your character never leaves the world. I have fairly advanced ai so you can set your character/companions/hirelings on certain tasks while you are gone. With a few twists I basically make an energy system here kind of, where you need to check in every now and then to get the most benefits.

For example if you or a companion die while you are gone, they stay dead until you login and res them. For other activities I could literally just have a timer. Your characters/hirelings only do their thing for so long before they just go home and then maybe defend is all. Some of this I was going to do anyways.

Thoughts?

 

The control differences and screen size make it so making the same game for both platforms is generally a bad idea.

That though I think pales in comparison to the vastly different play styles. On PC you build games expecting sessions taking hours at a time, and can pace your game accordingly. On mobile though, people want to fire up your game while they are waiting in line to get their hair cut for 10 minutes, and jump out of it at any point when real life moves forward. So on PC you can tell long winded stories, have the player involved in long dialog and complicated puzzles they really have to work at to figure out. On mobile though you can't expect the player to sit through all that.

I've got a friend that had been working on a multiplayer real time tactics game, tanks vs tanks, etc. His idea for including mobile though was to make it a completely separate part of the game. An ally on mobile would just do air strikes, flying in over the battle in progress, and drop bombs, then leaves that match up. I thought it was genius. Too bad he gave up on the game.