Convenience - The Toll to Pay for *Mingleplayer* Gamedesign

I have been playing a fair amount of Need for Speed Rivals since the release of the PS4 in Europe, and I am enjoying it for the most parts. However - the loss of convenience is what strikes me most about the game. Most inconveniences root directly in its *Always Multiplayer* gamedesign, like the inability to quickly restart an event as a racer, when one has attracted police attention, or the inability to start any event from anywhere.

Accounting for its *Always Multiplayer* aspect, there are lots of concessions to be made in order to prevent easy exploits breaking the competitive nature of multiplayer. Logic dictates that those concessions will always be made at the cost of convenience. In the case of Need for Speed Rivals, I'm not quite sure if the benefits outweigh the cost. Need for Speed is the definition of a *Convenient Food* franchise. Rivals is incredibly inconvenient at every turn, due to its *mingleplayer* focus. It doesn't quite jell for me.

Most games, by my point of view, are better if they are more convenient. Do all these upcoming *seamless multiplayer* games shoot themselves in their own foot? The inconviences inherent to such a thing are rarely a merit really. A clear cut between singleplayer and multiplayer still is the way to go for most games, it seems to me.

i would become a man of god to keep "mingleplayer" from catching on

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggh.

You made this topic just because you like using that word.

Dark Souls has "mingleplayer", therefore Dark Souls is terrible too? Wait what?

'Mingleplayer' is a good word. I also think it could be great for games, where MMOs often ruined immersion by saturating the world with heroes, allowing just a trickle of overlap can add dynamic events to a still-rich singleplayer world. And my internet connection is pretty good.

There will be good mingleplayer games and there will be bad mingleplayer games. It's a relatively new innovation and developers will take some time to figure out the strengths and weaknesses.

sultiplayer.

@fredchuckdave Dark souls gives the player an option to not get invaded or summon in help though. The fact that Need for Speed Rivals doesn't do that really hurts the game. Having an ability to just "turn off" the way the game treats multi player and thus unlock fast travel spots or hop into events from a menu screen among several other convenient options would be great.

But to answer the original poster, this won't always be the case. We are going to experience an excess of always online or mostly online multiplayer type games merged with single player games heading forward. Or to coin your phrase, "mingleplayer" games. Right now the sacrifices in game design seem soley set on convenience for balance purposes, but that is mostly because a lot of developers are just doing this for the first time. They look at the way an MMO is structured and try to blend that with their own game design ideas. This will of course evolve and change as this generation continues. Whether that means more options for people who want a more single player like experience, or even more overhauls into a games system and how they interact with each other. We will get there. Dark Souls being a great example of a game that has options similar to that.

I'm more worried about the longevity of these types of games. By relying on other players to provide content for a game that would normally be a single-player experience, this almost immediately puts a lifespan on the title.

Imagine if this happened last gen. You pick up Halo 3 and expect to relive the memories you had with the aging title. Nobody else is playing it at the moment, but you're not impacted at all because it's a single player game.

Add "mingleplayer" to the mix (I love this term by the way, good job) and all of a sudden your classic game is unplayable because nobody else is online when you want to play it. If this becomes commonplace, we're going to have to set up schedules where like-minded players can arrange a time to mingle. That sucks.

Same! Jesus H that's awful.

Disagree, so I guess I'll become a man of the devil instead.

I agree with this!

I had the same problems with NFSR-- especially when playing as the Racer, where the always online meant that not only could you never pause, but you couldn't even pull over at a gas station while you left the room to feed the cat or put out a grease fire because the random roaming cops would find you and bust you no matter how peacefully you're currently behaving.

So, get to the safehouse, whether you want to or not, and hope you don't get randomly run over by the Blues Brothers and a hundred goddamn cops coming around the mountain just as you're mid-drift and about to get home with your 250,000 carefully earned points! Because there's no YOU RECOVERED, and you just wasted a half hour of your life.

It makes me really worried about the slew of new games coming up next year (such as every single game from Ubisoft) which all seem to be pursuing this idea, half-blindly ripping it off from Dark Souls without really stopping to think about how it will effect the kind of game they're actually making, and the way people in real-world situations actually want to play it. I hope they learn some lessons from this.

Meanwhile, I'm selling NFSR to the first random person I can find on the street, because that game makes me angry in a way that's probably bad for my health.

The cop career is okay I guess.

Well, I mean, the multiplayer aspect of Dark Souls is its least desirable part. I just can't stand the idea of making my own way through the game, at my own pace, and suddenly I get invaded out of nowhere. Sure, you can just not go human, but I can just not leave my ethernet cable plugged in. Apparently in DS2 you get invaded anyway. Ugh, I just wanna turn that off.

Anyway, I think the idea is just now budding and it has plenty of merit, though I do think it should be something that you can turn off in every single case. I want to control when people can and cannot interfere with my single player games, and I don't want that control to consist of unplugging my internet just to make sure that some fucker doesn't jump in and ruin my day.

I hate you so much. That's a portmanteau of the highest order.

I hate you for introducing me to the word mingleplayer. I hope you burn in hell right now

I'll take mingleplayer over twerking any day of the week.

Mingleplayer is the best

I only came into this topic to express my loathing of that word and I'll punch anyone in the damn face for using it.

The hatred for mingleplayer baffles me. It is both catchy and conveys the concept well.

btw. *Mingleplayer* is an EA Ghost thing, I believe. I heard one of the game's directors use it in an interview. Cheeky, isn't it?

The very premise of the Souls games is centered around discomfort and inconvenience. It's part of its core design, and it's expected and cherished by its playerbase. I adore the Souls games. Doesn't mean what it does will jell for every game.

Like I said, I'd rather not be inconvenienced by a game like Need for Speed, a franchise which I play for comfort really. It's about happy fun times drifting with the fastest most exclusive supercars at breakneck speeds through the curvy slopes of a mountain road like an Olympic skier - and if I fuck it up too badly, I undo all my woes with the push of a button and go at it again (or do something else entirely). Rivals often forces me to ride it out, no easy way out, no matter what. Both the highs and the lows.

I'm not into Need for Speed for the lows.

KILL IT! KILL THE WORD WITH FIRE!

Of course, the other side of the coin is that it's hard to get a proper multiplayer match in a "mingleplayer" game. Luxuries such as "getting into a match when you want" and "playing with people you know" get hard to come by - as much as I really like the multiplayer in dark souls and it's "random interaction with strangers" thing, it annoys me that there's no option to help/invade the games of people on my friends list. And from the reviews I've seen, proper multiplayer races in NFSR are apparently a dicey prospect. By going half-and-half, you're throwing away convenience on both sides.

That doesn't excuse you from bringing it upon us

I think it's a swell word. So rather than excusing myself, I just didn't want to take credit for its playful brilliance.