Where is Skylanders character data stored?
According to press content:
Action Figures with Brains
Skylanders are special physical action figures that come to life in-game. Just take a Skylander, place it on the included Portal of Power, which is synched to your game console and a representation of your chosen Skylander will come to life in the video game and do your bidding. There are over 30 Skylanders in total - each with unique abilities and powers (three are included in your starter pack). Skylander action figures remember their in-game experiences and upgrades as they explore the mysterious world of Skylands, battle menacing creatures and collect treasures. Conveniently, it doesn't matter what gaming system your friends have at their house, the Skylanders work on and across all major video game systems. That means that you can take your Skylanders over to your friend's house, drop them on their Portal of Power and your Skylanders will come to life in the game.
I'm not as concerned about specific technologies (Bluetooth, RFID, NFC), that would be another question.
What I am asking is about data storage. Do each of the figurines have data storage? I don't see any other way to meet the goals that the press releases state. I guess they could use a unique identifier, and store data on the server?
So here's a specific question (with probably unnecessary detail)
Alice has Skylanders on the PS3. Bob has Skylanders on the Wii. Both of them buy Drobot. Alice levels hers up to level 7, and Bob levels his up to level 9. If bob, then takes his Drobot over to Alice's house. Will Bob be playing with his level 9 Drobot, or will it think it's Alice's level 7 Drobot?
The press release implies that it will by Bob's level 9 Drobot, but I'm a little skeptical.
So I see 4 options:
- Stored on figurine (Skeptical)
- Stored on console (easy, but doesn't meet press release)
- Stored on servers (easy, but requires Internet connectivity)
- Something else
Solution 1:
The data is stored in the figurine itself. While you play on the PC/Console versions, the data is updated continuously (that's why the figure must stay on the portal while in play), and the Skylanders keep their level when transferred between portals. The only exception is when playing on the 3DS version, where the data is stored in game and only transferred when the Skylander is transferred again into the game.
Also, the Skylanders top out at level 10.
Solution 2:
The data is indeed stored onto the figures themselves. I recently took one of my characters to a friend's house, dropped it on their portal, and the game loaded up the profile of the character I had been leveling on my house. What's interesting to me is the fact that it apparently works cross platform. While I played on an Xbox, my friend has it for the Wii. Despite this, the level 9 Terrafin I had on my game appeared on the screen at her house, complete with the ridiculous hat I had given it.
Solution 3:
The figures use RFID technology, which allows both read and write. It seems to work similar to the original Nintendo game codes in that at any point in the game, you can pause and view a letter/number code that represents the state (level, money, powerups, hat, etc) of your character. RFID allows for a small amount of data to be accessible to write operations, and therefore the state of the character is stored on the RFID tag inside it.
Activision has coordinated each of the platforms, plus the online web game to be able to use the code to understand the attributes of that particular figure. While this is good for taking your powers with you, as many have found, it doesn't let each player in the household level up the character separately.