Angry Gaming 07.16.07: Breaking Up the Band
Posted by Damian Sarcuni on 07.16.2007
Is a little decent co-op play too much to ask?
Welcome to Angry Gaming, the Yoko Ono that infiltrates and usurps the gaming industry thus turning it into a tree hugging hippie. I am your hate master, Damian Sarcuni, and last week G4TV interviewed Bungie's Frank O'Conner…something I did months ago. Damian 1, Morgan Webb 0.
Breaking Up the Band
Ok 411mania faithful, name a great team.
"LAX! Haas and Benjamin! The Midnight Express!"
No, no, I mean a non-wrestling team.
"The Black Eyed Peas! Queen! New Kids on the Block!"
Grrr…I was thinking something more along the lines of video game based fighting?"
"…"
Case in point, for the past two decades, video games have been an absolute barren desert wasteland when it comes to co-operative multiplayer game play. While the past seven years or so have been filled with glorious online play for consoles and the introduction of MMO's for the PC, co-op play has been relatively overlooked in the grand scheme of things. Those game developers who have even bothered to include co-op into their games have done so poorly, leaving gamers with botched messes on their consoles that just don't quite seem to add up to the experience we are looking for.
Don't believe me? I'll prove it to you. Gears of War, one of the top selling Xbox 360 games, featured not only a co-operative game play mode but also online versus modes based around 3-on-3 or 4-on-4 team play. In order to play in ranked online games (and really, what else matters on Xbox Live?) players had to learn to work as a strategic unit across well balanced maps of all kinds. It certainly sounds enough like a co-op paradise, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Even the great Gears of War got it all wrong. While the multiplayer game did focus on team based play, Xbox Live ranked games required players to pair up with random players of varying ages and skill levels. All too often, 21 year old veteran gamers would watch their precious stats go down the tubes because they were accidentally paired with a set of 12 year olds who just bought the game. What's more, since Gears used a peer to peer connection system, one team's captain is given a distinct advantage simply for hosting the game. While Epic Game studios attempted to counter this by blinding host players when they were shot in multiplayer, for the most part team based play was uninspired and unbalanced. The co-operative mission mode was amazing on the other hand, but was all too short and easy as the game did not increase in difficulty at all for the co-op mission mode.
At this year's E3 convention, game developers have shown a distinct interest in adding more co-operative play to their next generation games. New titles such as Army of Two, Quake Wars, and even Rock Band are adding in new modes and encouraging gamers to grab a few friends either around the TV or over the net and start playing together. Certain games even seem to be focusing exclusively on multiplayer modes in an attempt to make full use of next-gen console internet hardware, and to lure gamers into a growing fold that will have friends lists maxed out and a whole new generation teaming up for big wins.
Don't be fooled.
Many of us have longed for more co-op play both on our consoles and on our PC's since the first days of Doom, only to be teased by third rate attempts at bringing co-op play to our TV's and our computers. We've all heard this same song and dance before, and while developers often claim to focus on bringing new co-op experiences to gamers, the results are usually lackluster and not nearly as entertaining as what they could be. In order to fix this, here are three major mistakes game companies need to fix in order to bring about an actually good co-operative system, and some helpful suggestions of what they can do to finally make the change.
You Can't Have it Both Ways
Let's say you're playing a game of Unreal Tournament capture the flag. The game is tied at 2-2 and the next point wins the game. Your team, to their credit, bands together and comes up with a brilliant strategy that involves your fastest and most experienced player running up the center of the map while the rest of the team surrounds him/her and plays human shield. The plan works for the most part, but just as you arrive at your opponent's base: AMBUSH! Your enemy has pulled out the heavy ballistics and has cut through your teammates like a lightsaber through an unsuspecting arm. Now your flag runner is heavily wounded and only you remain with full health, taking out as many of the enemy as you can. As your comrade heads back for the base, you noticed a sniper a few yards away ready to fire off a headshot and ruin your precious plan completely. But in an epic maneuver, you drive in front of your flag runner, making the save while he/she makes use of your cover to take out the sniper and head back home to base, winning the point and the game.
It sounds great from a teamwork perspective, but look at the numbers. While you may have been vital to the victory and saved the day in that scenario, your teammate will be getting the credit for the kill and the point. You sacrificed your body for the greater good, but they will get all the glory, and you have nothing to show for it except for a lowered kill/death ratio and yet another death on your precious multiplayer statistics.
Games that claim to emphasize team based play don't seem to do very much of that. Even if a game exclusively uses team based multiplayer modes as Gears of War and Counter-Strike do, these same games tend to only record and reward individual player achievements. Nobody cares how many times you saved your friend's butt or how many brilliant strategies you've come up with. In the multiplayer gaming world the only thing that matters are KDR and headshots, and these reign as status symbols among the most 1337 players and their wannabes.
You could argue, at least from a statistics point, it is more feasible to program individual accomplishments as these are easier to track and require less involvement of random factors that could ruin a player's precious score. Hogwash! There's mods on Counter-Strike that can tell you how far you've carried a bomb and in Annex mode on Gears of War the game can tell you how long you've held a selected area. If programmers aren't tracking team based accomplishments in a team based game it is simply because they either do not have the time or inspiration to do so. This leads to the birth of the ever-annoying stat whores, those parasitic vermin gamers who are more concerned with getting as many kills as possible than actually winning the game. They'll sacrifice your whole team and its game plan for their precious kills, and end up ruining a decent gaming experience for everyone.
The solution is simple and obvious. Programmers who are creating a team based game need to promote team based play with team based accomplishments. More importantly, if there is a team based situation in the game, use it. I didn't learn how to use my wingmen to their fullest potential in the single player mode of Need for Speed Carbon just so I could go it alone in the multiplayer. We need to start tracking clan stats, allowing clan customization, and truly encourage team play through the entire game experience in order to make co-op situations work.
People Have Other Things to Do
When MMO's like Everquest first hit the market, gamers found themselves drawn into vast fantasy worlds filled with endless numbers of quests and challenges. There was so much to do in these online worlds, that gamers just couldn't keep all the fun to themselves. Soon MMO markets began to grow and new players started getting online to experience the massive RPG revolution. Meanwhile, all those experienced MMO players, who were now ready to log on and join their real world friends in virtual world fun, found that…well, they couldn't.
The appeal in massively multiplayer games comes from an entirely different type of gamer interaction (which is probably why so many casual gamers have picked up World of Warcraft). Rather than just interacting with a virtual world, gamers now have the ability to interact with each other as well, and this adds a tremendous amount of fun to an already decent experience. Even more important is the required amount of team play in MMO's, as one person can't successfully tackle most MMO challenges and still have a good time. These games require a well balanced group of players to go at it together. The problem comes in when all those casual players start to disappear.
What happens in Final Fantasy XI, when your paladin is at work, your ninja is at school, there isn't a galka among you and you don't have any defensive class to take those brutal, punishing hits for your team? The answer is nothing. In FFXI if just one player type is missing a truly successful party cannot be formed and precious experience point flow slows down to a crawl. Instead of the fast paced sense of accomplishment you get from having a balanced party cutting through enemies and gaining strength, at best you are left with an imperfect mess that will be able to waste time for a few hours and hopefully won't get killed.
And it's all because your bastard friends had to go out into the real world for awhile.
Games need to ENCOURAGE team play, not REQUIRE it. There is never any reason to punish players simply because they decide to stop playing your game for a little while. This is what things like the pause button and the power switch were originally invented for. MMO's are often time based and filled with exclusivity. If you happen to be away from your keyboard when an all too important mission or monster gets taken down, then you are out of luck and probably won't be able to get your precious quest completed anytime soon. This leads to a lot of waiting and standing around, something that shouldn't be part of games at all.
The solution here is to look at games like Guild Wars, which gently nudge gamers together as opposed to forcing them into the same party with sticky tape and glue. People are people and not everyone is going to get along, so being in a stressful situation where you have to be involved with those you don't like simply because you require their service is not appealing and really detracts from game play. Elements like these need to be removed and for a temporary solution need to be replaced with legitimate computer controlled allies who can handle themselves in a fight. That works in games like FFXI for now, but in the future, battle systems in RPG's and all games should be designed in such a way that they don't require anything. It's a game after all, not a goddamn train schedule.
The Internet is Not Kind
Ever had to listen to some retard rapper wannabe spit lyrics into his Xbox Live microphone like he was auditioning for your next Dr. Dre produced album? Ever had to watch someone spam your logs with racist commentary and porn URL's? Ever been team killed? You probably answered yes to all of these questions but with the way game developers act you would think these things never actually happened.
For some reason, gamers are expected to police themselves online and yet are neither rewarded nor given the proper tools to do so. These days even Nintendo is realizing that online play is a vital part of gaming, yet nobody seems to see the similarities between games and the rest of the internet. Things like harassment and trolling do happen online, so it stands to reason that they would happen in games too.
Try setting someone to "avoid" on Xbox Live. It doesn't do anything. A guy could shout every obscenity at you over his Xbox Live microphone and be marked to avoid in one round of Halo 2, but you can bet he'll still be there the next acting just as annoying. Reputation ratings don't mean anything either, they don't keep anyone from actually playing a game. There's nothing to stop a little kid from getting into a game of Gears of War either, even though the game is rated M for mature. In ranked games, host players aren't allowed to kick anyone and thus are even forced to play with those sabotaging the game. Even better is that quitting is such a problem in these games that trying to leave an annoying situation results in more punishment for the fleeing gamer, losing rank points in the game just for disconnecting.
Developers really need to start thinking things through and be honest about who is actually playing video games. These days the answer is everyone, and that unfortunately means that a certain amount of protection and parenting is required. I don't mean to scare anyone, but is it really such a stretch of the imagine to think that pedophiles or perverts might be lurking around on Lord of the Rings Online or sending out gifts on Viva Piñata? I understand there is a timeline for game releases and not everything can be thought of in one shot, but its high time developers acknowledged that not all gamers are friendly and some simply need to be dealt with.
There are a few solutions to this problem, the most obvious one is to give simply give gamers more control over who they can and can't play with. A much broader solution, one that I hope will be incorporated in the future would be to incorporate something like age verification or cyber patrolling into online games. Hey, I'm all for freedom of speech and letting games spread to those souls blessed with early maturity, but damn all I'm just really sick of playing with assholes and little kids, bottom line.
The Anger
I'm hoping and praying that the upcoming game releases showcased to the media this year will be all that they promise and that multiplayer co-op gaming will hit a boom in the next coming year. I simply don't believe the industry has prepared themselves properly yet though, and I foresee a lot of multiplayer communities quickly forming and then dying with equal speed. Developers are more than welcome to prove me wrong, and god willing at the very least these upcoming co-op focused games will pave some ground work that will lead to breakthroughs based on what we've come up with today. Or they could just read 411mania and get the answers now while we're young. Until next time, embrace the hatred.
