A piece on the evolution, increased popularity and significance of multiplayer and MMOs. Er. Look I needed a bit to put before the jump okay.
The proliferation of the internet went pretty well. The populations of the first world are now almost completely connected, whenever they wish to be. You can tweet from your phone, blog from your mp3 player and strafe-jump using nothing but the power of Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer. Hell, even OnLive, the “it’s never gonna happen” Crysis-on-an-Eee project, has entered beta. So, as our connectivity and speeds increased PC gaming began to exploit the new technology and create greater, more complex multiplayer experiences than had been available anywhere else before. The MMO, the co-op RTS and every possible way of chatting known to man – video, audio and text given their own dedicated, multinational services and networks – developed for the masses.
That has led to where we are today: almost every game is released with a multiplayer component; every big company is wanting a slice of the HolyGrailPie that is subscription based MMOs and it is becoming increasingly left to the indie and smaller developers to provide single-player focused genres such as the adventure – most of which are deployed via digital download only. Multiplayer has become an addiction. Let our first investigation be into MMOs and the simple question: why?
Answer: $70 a second, every second, every day. World of WarCraft’s ~12.5 million playerbase paying ~$14.95 per month. On to this you add the sales of the actual boxed game and expansions; the deals made with card game companies, model makers, internet streamers, peripheral makers; the money made from mergers all thanks to the popularity and quality of a singular game. Not only this but the attention it draws to other titles by the same company – how many WoW players are now proud owners of Diablo Battlechests and StarCraft II pre-orders?
This provides resources for what your designers, programmers and artists love doing – making games. Money gives you time, time gives you quality and, theoretically, quality gives you money. It allows you to build bigger studios; hire more experienced directors; create larger, more talented teams. That is why everyone wants an MMO. That is why we have seen so many lame copies and half-assed attempts at a bit of the cake. That is why so many brilliant ideas may have been wasted.
Think of one of the many MMOs released in recent years, successful, sufficing or failed. How many could have made superb single-player titles? Imagine if, instead of buying server clusters they had hired cinematic designers and voice actors; turned those vaguely entertaining set-pieces into works of pre-rendered beauty and those lines of text into enthusiastically acted dialogue. Unchanging, unliving universes becoming worlds where choices matter, characters die, endings happen.
I am not blind to the faults of my ideas – MMOs are good too. They allow for socialisation on an epic scale, teamwork on a level most could never experience. It allows for games to go on “forever”, your character never dying and his fate eternally in your hands. This appeals to me as much as any of you, I played WoW for years, I will play it again no doubt. But I worry for the future as well – for APB, Final Fantasy XIV, Star Trek, The Secret World and the various superhero games. All games with brilliant ideas and (from previews and media) talented development teams behind them; all games that could be ruined by the costs of servers and massive support teams, not to mention the natural limitations of MMOs relating to difficulty and logistics. I hope they do well, I look forward to playing them and I cannot wait to experience them with my friends; but in the current climate original, non-standard games do not need any additional penalties towards their chances of success.
Of course, not every game released or announced “recently” has been an MMO. Now we move onto what I think is the more worrying side of current trends – co-op. A feature so widely requested, one that can be so much fun in the right environment. There are games I have spent literally hours thinking “Man, this would be so brilliant with ventrilo and a couple of friends” (looking at you Mass Effect) and I enjoyed Left 4 Dead as much as the next sensible man. Sadly, we have the same over-application problem – situations where the addiction to multiplayer has hindered rather than helped. Take Red Alert 3: not the worst game you’ll ever play, but a certainly flawed single-player. Perhaps if, instead of developing a passable AI system (that still caused frustration and rage in the more complex missions) and designing every single map around two bases, there had been a focus on quality gameplay I would have actually bothered to finish all three campaigns and purchased the expansion.
This extends to the future too – Borderlands, the ridiculously highly anticipated RPG from Gearbox, is a very exciting looking game. A lovely art style, comedy feel and the first high-profile FPSRPG not to come out of Bethesda. With a squad of four members at its head and a strong focus on the co-op aspect of their play, it is only natural to be excited. However, perhaps one of the reasons Mass Effect worked so well was because you couldn’t bring in friends to take control. While the AI of your team-mates did have the odd bug, it didn’t seem to matter, as all they were ever meant to do was follow you. Once that AI has to deal with the ability to do everything a player can, it is much more likely to bug out.
Another side to this is that a game experience crafted around cooperative play can be thoroughly mediocre when played alone. Left 4 Dead is – there just isn’t the same character in the pre-generated … characters. Again, I simply worry that those of us who prefer to play alone (or have odd gaming hours or dodgy internet connections) will be swept aside in the pursuit of an elusive, possibly non-existent, crowd.
You may ask: why play alone? Well, other than obvious answers of “because I don’t have too many gaming friends” and “other people suck”, I do not like dependence on others attendance to continue to enjoy a gaming experience I have paid for. This is uniquely a co-op problem, as MMOs are closer to a single-player game with other people in it (at least some of the time) and deathmatch or competitive games do not lend themselves so well to playing with the same crowd over and over. Indeed, currently I take part in a supposedly weekly Pen ‘n’ Paper RPG session that has been postponed for a month so far, simply because not everyone was available at the same time for a multitude of reasons. This problem is present in enough situations as it is, an expansion into gaming is not something I approve of.
It must be said that this addiction has provided some of the gaming related applications ever. Look at services such as Steam which have become primary distribution platforms for games that otherwise may not have been successful – Audiosurf, arguably the best money I’ve ever spent, being a primary example. The continuing growth of e-sports is also something that should be nurtured as much as possible, Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net 2.0 seemingly leading the brunt of the charge in that direction after over a decade of community dedication. Both of these services (along with others such as XBOX Live and Playstation Network) also provide ways in which single-player can be improved through stat tracking and achievements as well as automated patching mechanisms to ensure bugs are fixed quickly.
But the positives I really want to focus on are the truly unique games that have come out of the multiplayer focused. Let the first example be Eve Online, a game that simply would not work without other players. The intricacies (including, as mentioned yesterday, espionage) of massive scale PvP, alliance vs. alliance combat, while remaining something I merely strive to take part in, are not something that can be simulated by the utterly inferior AI we currently have access to. Perhaps it never will. There are elements of this that are true of all MMOs, such as the variable economy or simple unpredictability of humanity. Deep.
Lastly, there are the rare, oft brilliant MMOFPSs. This is a genre I am so very excited about the future of. Rumours that Blizzard’s unannounced MMO is of this type keep me on tenterhooks – you know they’ll do it right. Planetside, despite still being stupidly expensive to play, is a constant temptation that I sadly have not yet had the time and money to take part in but the concept of WoW- or even Eve-scale play with differing mechanics interests me. As an extension of this, the possibilities of the MMORTS, a concept still very much in the Alpha phase of its life, are something I think we will see a massive interest in as we enter the next decade and internet connections become still more powerful in more locations.
If anything is to be gleaned from this article, it is that multiplayer is something that will, and should, continue to expand. But it should also be noted that it is not the be all and end all of gaming, that the individual’s experience is still important to some games and that if that experience is lost or replaced then that could be a grievous blow to one of the things that makes gaming unique: different every time due to your own actions, and your own actions alone.
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Or in short, wordwordswordswordswords. Man I liked writing that, and have been meaning to for a while. Wish I’d been able to put some images in, but the writing took longer than I was expecting.
I was wanting to do a review today but technical difficulties prevented me doing so, hopefully that will happen tomorrow. I also have an idea for an interview that may materialise, as well as associated work with gaming websites. My weekly newsletter for StarCraft Legacy should also be available tomorrow.