FPS Multiplayer design needs to change!

[Dele]

I am sure we are all aware of the long term trends in the video game industry. Single-player gaming experience has becomn significantly shorter and less important, while games selling almost exclusively on multiplayer aspects, are creating untold amounts of wealth to companies like Blizzard and Infinity Ward. Multiplayer mode has gone a long way from just being an attachment that kicks in when your buddy is visiting, to defining the way we experience certain titles.

That being said, I find it extremely discomforting how little multiplayer FPS games have evolved from 56-bit modem era to 'Modern' Warfare 2.

More than ten years ago we had games like Goldeneye and Quake and later their upgrades: Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike and Halo. Sure the games were laggy as hell and the best player was that rich brat with a 512 kb connection but it was something we had never experienced before as gamers and it did not bother much.. as long as we were winning of course.

The design philosophy from that era was quite simple: You create a box and fill it with cubes and power-ups and then let players kill eachother for short rounds. If you wanted more teamwork, you maybe threw a map with a flag or bomb or something in there that gives the chaotic players something to focus upon.

Now there was a good reason for such a minimalist approach. Lack of raw power and good connections around seriously hampered the possibility of creating different kinds of experiences. Now consider a modern FPS for a while. Several games create an absolutely fantastic (if short) single-player experience that combines immersive atmosphere with astonishing visuals. The second I connect online, all these features are robbed and back into the box you go again.

What just happened to all those large maps I played? Where did all my AI mates disappear with huge epic battles? Speaking of AI where are all those civilians running around the battlefield? How come my character is not reacting to anything anymore? The command structure and automatic communication between characters are gone instantly. My avatar does not even give any vocal response if some terrorist blows the brains of my best friend while we are scouting the forward area. If I get to ride an awesome helicopter in the single-player mode, why I cant fly around with it in the multiplayer, even if it only takes us in and out of the battlefield while the next map loads? In fact, why there even needs to be such a huge difference between single-player and multiplayer game modes in general? Cant we have immersive rounds full of diversity that last for 30 minutes? An hour? Stunning cinematics too? Most of the content that the developer spent huge bucks developing is taken away even if it makes sense to include.

The joke is becoming bad quite fast. Now they even charge us 10 euros for a couple of extra maps in top of that 50 euros the game already costed. Most of the money goes to developing content we see only for a couple of hours. The modding scene has shown us several times that any skilled fan with tools could make an extremely playable map in only a week.

Now I dont say you can't enjoy multiplayer FPS games as they currently are, but I feel that the excessive conservatism is holding the industry back from evolving and providing us a wide range of different FPS games with different feel, instead of just another UT/CS -clone with attribute tweaks and a couple of gimmicks.

 

[Radeonx]

It is kind of hard to take gigantic maps and create exciting games with a 32 player cap in them.
I mean, look at Modern Warfare 2. There was that one snow map, the biggest in the game. It was the most boring map in the game, because of how long it took for everyone to find eachother.
Why get gigantic maps when the small ones work just as well? They take settings from the campaign and implement them into the multiplayer maps anyways, so I don't see a problem.

 

[Dele]

Spoiler

It is kind of hard to take gigantic maps and create exciting games with a 32 player cap in them.
I mean, look at Modern Warfare 2. There was that one snow map, the biggest in the game. It was the most boring map in the game, because of how long it took for everyone to find eachother.
Why get gigantic maps when the small ones work just as well? They take settings from the campaign and implement them into the multiplayer maps anyways, so I don't see a problem.

I apologize if I did not clarify myself clearly enough. The first point essentially was that the multiplayer design philosophy itself is obsolete and only manages to create a single type of experience and doesn't fit well if we want to create, for example, larger maps and longer rounds or "single-player multiplayer" -hybrid maps. The second point was that all the goodies that make the single-player fun are mostly taken away from multiplayer for little reason.

If the map is created to be boring, it will be boring. There are numerous ways to make a huge map interesting. AI mass assaults, vehicular focus, fast means of transportation, natural or mechanical strongpoints, dynamic spawn points, limited flanking routes, splitting the map to smaller pieces and gradually expanding the map to name a few.

Nobody wants to wander around for 10 minutes to find a battle and then only to be shot to the head by a camping sniper. Huge epic maps need huge epic battles. The industry is geared towards giving battlegrounds with the mindset "This design works really well for small maps with short rounds so it might work with large maps too". It doesn't at all and non-sniper players dislike many of the larger maps because of the flawed design. The circle will be complete when game developers notice that the large maps are generally disliked by the gaming population and so they create smaller maps which "inherently" have a better flow and more action.

 

[vrbtny]

Halo....is quite drastically different from Modern Warfare 1 and 2.

 

[random_bars]

There are a lot of games that already do that. You ever played Team Fortress 2?

But I can see your point.

 

[Popadoo]

I agree with most of what you say, but you can't blame Blizzard for making money out of multiplayer. They make MMOs, those are just all multiplayer all the time.

 

[psivamp]

Go play BF:BC2 if you want big maps. Seriously, those maps are huge. And you can fly helicopters, drive boats and tanks...

Edit: More OT: The reason they don't create massive cooperative/competitive multiplayer like you describe partly because it's untested ground. If I'm reading your posts right, you want to play things like UT's old Assault mode, except with a bunch of AI running around defending instead of a small human team. The problem with mixing AI and human opponents is that they don't act the same. You can pick out a human from a group of AI opponents rather easily. And, AI, unless carefully written, cheat.

 

[Dele]

There are a lot of games that already do that. You ever played Team Fortress 2?

Played it from the launch for several years due good friends. Superbly executed and the continued support from Valve is truly exceptional. Still the class gimmick that the game revolves around is not in any way fresh or new. Think about Return To Castle Wolfenstein that has been around for 10 years. Fills the niche I guess but still very conservative.

Halo....is quite drastically different from Modern Warfare 1 and 2.

You are right that the mechanics and attributes differ somewhat between those games but the IDEAS behind those mechanics are not so different. Halo went down UT branch of FPS instead of CS branch and I would describe Halo as more or less Unreal Tournament with regenerating health and shield gun replaced with a melee button. It would be perfectly plausible to build a Halo mod to UT3 that would be BETTER than the orginal game at playability.

Just think how many games it took Bungie to fix weapon balance. We had overpowered pistols and overpowered battlerifles and 4 games later we might actually have some weapon balance. The execution was absolutely horrible. Now think how much combat has evolved (heh) between different Halo games? Here you have a gimmick called dual wield. Okay let's drop that for a new gimmick called armor ability. You are playing the same game over and over again with a different MOD and slight variation in attributes. As soon as the new gimmick game was scheduled, all support for old games was instantly abandoned except for slight playlist updates.

Now that's what I call a gimmick farm. They sell the same game over and over again with a new gimmick that could have been included to the core game with minimal effort and ask you to pay the price for graphics update and hope the new gimmick makes you play the same game for an another year. This whole industry is full of it and it's more and more about Halo 2011 or CoD 2012 than new and innovative games. We are just waiting for Modern Warfare 3...

 

[moretimethansense]

It is kind of hard to take gigantic maps and create exciting games with a 32 player cap in them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Battlefront
Sorry I just had to corect that assesment.