I’ve spent some time trying to examine multiplayer games, and what sets the good ones apart from the bad ones. I would like to state in advance though that I believe online multiplayer and local multiplayer have to be looked at in a completely different light.

Taking a look at online multiplayer first, one of the biggest things I found was that the more communication involved, and the more team work involved…the more I enjoyed the game. It seems like a fairly obvious conclusion, but you’d be surprised how many multiplayer games out there completely ignore this. Full Auto 2 does not allow you to communicate in any way, shape or form…it’s almost to the point where you don’t even feel like your playing the game online. Soldier of Fortune 2 back on the Xbox forced players into voice chat channels that maxed out at 4 people; which doesn’t seem like a big deal except that if your team was 5 people you were stuck talking to nobody, or possibly someone from the other team.

To support communication among team mates, you really have to have something supporting it in your multiplayer design. One of the examples I like to think of is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which not only had objective based multiplayer, but had roles that needed to be fulfilled to be able to complete the mission. This gives that little bit of extra motivation to players to communicate and work as a team, you aren’t worried so much about your own kill count anymore, your worried about the win, which typically scores you more points towards your online stats.

If your not familiar with the game, they have a class system built in where engineers have to plant charges in particular areas to access another point of a level or complete an objective, you have medics that can revive fallen team mates or heal them while they are still alive, you have commanders that can call air strikes to positions, as well as hand out ammunition. It’s very simple, but it gets 8 guys (or gals) screaming at each other for ammo, health, protection, it gets people talking, and right away the game feels more involved, more enjoyable, and more purposeful. The team that brought you Wolfenstein went on to create the Quake themed multiplayer game with an almost identical multiplayer system, but unfortunately due to the larger maps in the game the combat suffered, and the gameplay itself just wasn’t as tight. I’m not a big proponent of the large scale battlefield style shooters though, so maybe thats just an opinion and not fact.

I’ve enjoyed two other recent multiplayer games that to some degree get this right, these being Call of Duty 4, and Team Fortress. Call of Duty’s greater strengths come in the large number of personal achievements in the game, so it’s still less team motivated. Team Fortress 2 did a great job setting up the class system that’s even more exaggerated then Wolfenstein, giving everyone their own role, but I still find the gameplay to be much more frantic and less strategic; still not involving the same level of communication as Wolfenstein.

Try not to misunderstand my statements here, I’m not trying to suggest Wolfenstein was the be all end all of multiplayer games, but I do believe some of the better things it did almost forcing communication between team mates should be recognized and something to keep in mind when designing multiplayer games.

A lot of video games these days are starting to incorporate more and more decision making for the player, primarily in RPG’s. But I’d like to make a point about them, and that is that most of the time the decisions are extremely uninteresting and very transparent. The best example to use for comparison here is Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I love Kotor just as much as the next RPG/Star Wars fan, but I must say the decision making in the game is vastly overrated, you have a complete understanding of each decision you make, and generally the effect it will have on the game world and outcome of the game. They are just far too obvious, and underneath whatever words are being used in the sentence your ultimately being asked the exact same question time and time again: Do you want some light side points; or dark side points right now?

This is where Deus Ex comes in and I have to give Warren Spector some due credit for his design, all of the decisions in Deus Ex are to a much larger degree surrounded by ambiguity, and you really never understand fully if the decisions you make are going to effect the game in a large or small way, or if your making a right or wrong decision. This is why I’d argue the decision making is actually ten times more interesting, because (as lame as this sounds) you ultimately have to look within yourself to make the decision on the spot, and the game ends up being more shaped to your own personality.

Very early in Deus Ex your posed with the option of joining a religious cult that suggests the government you’ve been working for is corrupt, or meeting with the government that suggests it is the good guy and that the religious group is nothing more then terrorists, at another point you are asked to assassinate someone, but if you actually go speak to the person your sent to assassinate he will offer a larger sum of money to kill the person who originally contracted you. I’m sure you see the difference by now, both of those situations offer different challenges and outcomes for the game, but there ultimately is no right or wrong, it’s just a lot of gray area (much like real life).

Final Point: If you understand a decision, it isn’t an interesting one.

As a bit of background, I generally like all games, but most don’t invoke any strong feelings of hatred or joy, for me it’s more about relaxation most of the time. This got me thinking more and more about the pacing of particular games, wondering if there was some magical formula for pacing (how to separate or break up the action) in a video game, or if it was really just dependent on the person or type of person the game is being built for.

Unfortunately for me, my lack of emotion during gameplay makes it somewhat difficult for me to determine how much I’m enjoying some games, and my decision to stop playing something is almost sub conscience more then anything. I honestly find that the flow of the game can sometimes supersede how fun the gameplay is. This is why I believe a games like Knights of the Old Republic are so successful. In my humble opinion, I actually find Kotor to be the best paced game in existence.

Let’s face it, for the most part Kotor’s gameplay is very similar to many other RPG’s, you move your avatar around, take part in some basic conversation, and decision making, fight your random filler enemies, and finally face off against the occasional boss (or tougher foe). What I think sets it apart though is the way is was built so your always moving on to your next objective, and you always know what it is. The game is very good at keeping you moving toward your next destination.

It also has a very relaxed tone through most of the game, which I think is quite important in making it addictive to play. Hideo Kojima mentioned in an interview about Metal Gear Solid 2 a few years back why he likes to include all the various jokes he does. He says he uses them specifically to break up tension, because if a player would shut the game off after long bouts of tension. What I honestly think Kotor did was they really just found a medium point of tension, and try to keep you there the entire game.

I actually think Bioware nearly had it down to a science, you start off at the low point, your introduced to a number of easily beatable but still challenging badguys on along your basic path, you reach your tension high point at the end of the “dungeon” (which most of these sequences pretty much followed the dungeon format), at which point your thrown back into the ultimate low point of tension where your back at your ship, and ready to select a new planet to move to. I also think the game’s ability to save anywhere removes tension that would in fact otherwise be there, as the player has a less of a chance of feeling any anxiety about dying and having to redo from a certain save point.

The Final Point: I personally felt it was Kotor’s pacing that made it the game it was, obviously the theme, the story, the graphics all play a huge part as well…but deep down I think it was the big thing that set it apart. It didn’t have a groundbreaking fighting system, the conversation system was good, but far from perfect, the decisions in the game weren’t nearly as interesting as they could have been, but it was paced JUST right to keep you moving, to keep you from getting bored, and to keep you from feeling like you needed a break.

Anyways, I’ve tried to illustrate the flow in a basic graph below (click image):

I hate seeing “iterative crap” released as much as the next gamer, but some recent experiences have made me question just how justified rants on the subject might be.

The two games in point here are Gears of War, and Prey. Gear of War; the hit title which has come under a bit of fire for its lack of innovation. Prey; being the game bringing many new and interesting ideas to the realm of first person shooters, which on paper make the game look…dare I say “groundbreaking”, but ultimately scored in the mediocre range with reviewers and gamers alike. Some of the possible explanations I can think of are that Gears of War is simply more fun, the new ideas in Prey are not good, innovation really doesn’t matter, or all of the above.

Gears of War being more fun?…Well its quite true: the mission design is much tighter, it brings to the table a number of new cool weapons (the giant laser beam that shoots down from the sky), it has online cooperative support, and while they aren’t overly unique sequences it does have some differed gameplay thrown randomly to change the way you play the game slightly (shooting gas canisters to light up an area), and finally some boss sequences. None of these are really new to video games or shooters for that matter, but Gears of War manages to answer gaming’s golden question (Is it fun?) with a big fat YES.

The ideas in Prey are not good?…This is a tough question to answer, again when I was doing my initial pre-purchase homework, everything about it sounded like it was going to be this great new FPS experience. I mean the whole concept of portals in the game, the out of body experiences, walking on walls, all set against a reasonably good storyline. But now where the debate can come in for real is the question posed above…were the ideas simply not good? or was it poor application. I personally found a lot of the walking on walls sequences to be disorienting more then anything, causing not much but another level of frusturating to some gameplay sequences. The out of body experiences while cool, didn’t end up feeling anymore satisfying then your typical find the red key to open the red door sequences found in past games, becuase that’s all it was really used for. Finally the whole portal system, which to me ended up feeling like nothing more then walking through a door or crouching to crawl into a vent. It was just a slightly odd way of entering a new environment, almost feeling like an excuse not to build a transitional area between the two parts of the level.

I’m not going to sit here and say innovation doesn’t matter, but my ultimate point is that I don’t think brand new feature(s), no matter how great they sound, aren’t a home run unless they are applied correctly. From the looks of it, Valve’s Portal game is going to have a much better application of the portal concept, the out of body experiences found in Prey I still feel have a lot of potential for interesting gameplay, but I think it needed to be applied to a lot more interesting things then opening doors (how about using your body as a decoy against enemies…who knows?). Finally the walking on sticky walls thing, I’d probably leave out of my game, it is possible Prey’s dark environments made them more disorienting then they needed to be, but I still just wasn’t a fan of any of the sequences that used them.

Final Realization: It’s more about application then innovation. So I would probably take the comments made by EA’s producer with a grain of salt, and hope that the great new features found in Army of Two end up being implemented well.