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.