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.

In all forms of entertainment, ideas get lost. Whether overlooked due to being in the “wrong” titles, ignored due to poor implementation or overshadowed by something much more hyped (and sometimes better too), these ideas are used only a few times and then lost to the ages. In gaming, this as true as it is elsewhere. Here I will analyse some of my favourites and lament their passing.

Mechanic: In Fighting
Notable Games: Doom, Doom II
Description: Why fight when there are those that will fight for you?

Why is this first? It was the inspiration for this article. It’s so simple, and so underused. Out of hell comes a flood of demons, devils and living dead guys, intent on the destruction of the human race. They’re bloodthirsty killing machines – so why would they only fight the player? We aren’t talking scriped sequences here, we’re talking an actual mechanic that means creatures will fight each other if they shoot each other. The most obvious example is the entire section of Level 8 – Tricks and Traps from Doom 2, seen below at roughly 3:33:

There are other places it is used – places it has to be used that are less obvious. On the harder settings it becomes a key part of the way you play. The possibilities it opens up are amazing – what’s cooler than facing off against a big badass boss? Making two of them fight eachother. What’s cool than wiping out a room of bad guys, single handed? Doing it without firing a shot.

There have been attempts of course – Bioshock’s Big Daddies and turrets come to mind (along with the 10,000 games with aliens vs. military), but it was all so more controlled. It wasn’t swarms of enemies fighting each other if you made them, it was set up events, designed to look cool but often with a predefined winner. Perhaps that’s part of the problem – the first person shooter has evolved from multiple, differing enemies to either a bunch of identikits with differing guns or a bunch of identikits holding different guns with alien backup.

An honourable mention should probably be made to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and its randomly generated fights. It’s not quite the same thing but it’s along the right lines, though even more to the non-scripted side. This highlights another point – perhaps the mechanic has simply evolved into something altogether different: utterly scripted fights or random encounters with scripted interactions.

Is it even possible to ressurect this mechanic? I’d like to think so. I’m looking at you id, I’m looking at you and Doom 4.

Why is there no Doom 4 imagery yet?

Mechanic: Bugs
Notable Games: StarCraft
Description: Beneficial screw ups.

Anyone whos read everything else I’ve ever written has probably seen this pop up a few times – StarCraft, the most balanced, most competitive, most played competitive RTS in the world is only this way because of bugs in the game code. They play a vital role in two main components of the reasoning behind it being so popular: constantly varying metagame and a collosal skill ceiling. Discovery of every little trick adds an extra action that can be applied for differences, whether miniscule or immense. Workers go all noclip when they’re moving towards resources, units can move and fire (some can move backwards and fire), air units can move and remain “stacked” – it all adds up to massive advantages and changes in the way you play.

The interesting thing is that it’s perfectly possible this mechanic is as common as ammo counters and experience points – it’s just other games haven’t had an addicted community, which considers an entire nation to be only “the biggest section” of itself, relentlessly testing for eleven and a half years. Even if they are found, most developers patch them out – Team Fortress 2′s “uber saving” trick comes to mind.

And it’s hardly developable is it? If it’s kept, it becomes a feature, if not, a bug that was fixed; relegated to some ancient set of patch notes. Even StarCraft has banned bugs, the ones so game breaking they are disallowed in professional and ladder play, overseen by diamond-eyed referees. This is one feature I can almost guarantee we won’t see again – the nature of larger beta tests, bigger development studios, more Q&A and simply the differences between isometric engines and full-3D ones make it a thing of the past.

Buggy.

Mechanic: Brilliant RPGs
Notable Games: Deus Ex, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (patched, naturally), Mass Effect
Description: The best of the best

Perhaps this doesn’t really fit here, perhaps I’m exploiting my topic to provide a rant on “games these days” or something. This section is devoted to when western RPGs get it spot on. Deus Ex’s plot, variable routes, two entire different sort of games. Vampire’s dialogue, voice acting and characters. Mass Effect’s brilliance in storytelling and cinematic moments.

Why RPGs you might say? Because it has become like some sort of super-genre. You have your “standard” Neverwinter Nights/Baldur’s Gate affair, your first person Oblivion/Fallout 3/Deus Ex, third-person, MMO, spaceships, Star Wars – even RTS, what with WarCraft III’s “commando” missions, StarCraft II’s campaigns and Dawn of War II’s MMORPG-like singleplayer. Games you would never expect to contain RPG elements (see: Wolfenstein) begin to have shop systems and open world hubs.

Notice my three main examples all had flaws. Deus Ex’s charm can wear off when you realise setting off most of the alarms means you just get to shoot everyone in the face, Vampire’s legendarily buggy release and Mass Effect’s repetitive mission structure (and the there-are-no-words-strong-enough inventory system). There were fixes for each of these – the player designed “challenges” (no guns), fan patches and … well just not doing them (and ignoring it), respectively.

Well, this is one “mechanic” we can hope we’ll see again. Dragon Age looks promising – though the way it was presented to the media is apparently worrying (a point I disagree with, but more on that at a later date). RPGs are always being made, so it’s inevitable that we’ll have another.

(NB: I know there are probably other games that could go into this, I just haven’t played them (Yes I haven’t played KOTOR (Yes I know, I know)))

We got the best (the best, the best, the best, the best) from you.

Mechanic: Eve Online
Notable Games: …
Description: A single server, player controlled, PvP focused

Its only been done once, there isn’t another like it and the game itself may have lost part of that charm. It should probably be noted early on that I am certainly an Eve noob – I’ve played the game for a few weeks and I do enjoy it, but I’ve never taken part in any of the kind of events I’m about to describe. The source for most of my knowledge is RockPaperShotgun’s Jim Rossignol and articles he’s written/linked to in the past, along with friends of mine which enjoy the game.

That aside – Eve creates a near-perfect simulation of an event which has not occured in human history. You see the innate oxymoron, but would you disagree? Thousands of players, conducting warfare in a very traditional manner. Individuals are meaningless here, even the best ships are easy to take down in fleets of smaller, cheaper vessels. Direct combat is not the only means of destroying your opponent – espionage is equally useful, huge empires crumbling after clever manipulation by just one man.

The control players have over the universe is astounding – you can make cities, destroy what others have worked long and hard to create, influence the economy. The training system helps in this: specialising can go so far that it is now impossible to master everything. This is part of what creates that infamous learning curve, famously shown as a wall of death that flips back upon itself, complete with hangmans noose and spiked pits. But when you get it (and spend enough time there and you will), it’s a thing of beauty.

No other MMO is as much fun to read about – so much is possible. And perhaps, that is why, again, I fear we will never see the like again. The community for a game such as this is very small, and Eve has them all. Competitors also suffer from WoW Syndrome: CCP have a massive lead on any game released now. It is also almost completely dependant on the community to create an atmosphere that accepts going to a player’s house and cutting their power a valid tactic of PvP. This is Eve, suck it up.

See? Realistic. Don't look at me like that.

I hope you enjoyed this opening of my mind. I hope to post something related but a little different tomorrow. If you enjoyed this, please spread the word and feel free to contact me via any of the options on the about page.