Thoughts on Online FPSs

I haven't gotten a new game yet, so I have been amusing myself playing various first person shooters online. I played a bit of Crysis, CounterStrike Source, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Unreal Tournament 2004, and even Zombie Panic Source (Sorry I still don't have Call of Duty 4 yet, and Battlefield 2142 isn't working anymore). I have been thinking about online multiplayer FPS design, and I wanted to just kinda open up the can and spill out some random ideas here, for both of my loyal readers to enjoy. I will just roll out the random screenshots while explaining my ideas in no particular order. Steam is Good for Multiplayer

Ah, Steam. Without Steam, PC gaming would probably be on its way out by now. It truly is a great thing. I thank Valve for making Steam and making it right. Yeah, EA has their downloader thing that no one uses if they don't have to (I have that to thank for my broken copy of BF2142NS), but Steam really is the thing that caught on. I will say right now that EA really should just stop even trying with whatever they are doing and go straight to Valve right now to join the Steam community. It would definitely improve their sales. Every time I see that another company has joined Steam I feel happy for Valve and thank the company in my mind (Thanks go out to Epic, the most recent company to join; their Unreal Tournament series is already on the bestseller list on Steam). I also think that more games should use the Valve server system, but that isn't as pressing of an issue. It truly would be a glorious day when every major game company joins Steam, but I doubt with all of my pessimism that that day will ever come.

Weapons, and Overall Balance of the FPS

This is a big one. I will try not to ramble too much here... There have been many, many online FPSs now that have come and gone, and many more that are still running strong (What? Quake 3? Half Life 1?). When a developer starts writing a multiplayer portion of a game, they are faced with many options and decisions to make. Do we include classes? How many weapons should there be? What kinds of rewards do the players get, if any, and how? Are there unlockables? How fast should the game run? Their answers to these questions determine the shape of the game, and if they make the right decisions, their game could still be played 5+ years after release. There are games like UT which are more based on blowing the hell out of the enemy, no matter how unrealistic (Unreal is in the title, after all) or how little brain power it takes. A game like BF2142 takes more smarts, and requires much more teamwork. With that, I would like to go right into my next topic,

Hardcoreness

How good does a new player have to be to be able to compete with the people who have been playing your game for a year? This is a hard one. You don't want to make your hardcore players feel like they have not grown at all in their months of play time, but you do not want to make the barrier to entry so high that the newcomers will just get mad and leave. This does have a bit to do with the community (more on that later), but most of it is based on the balance and weapon usage. More twitchy games have proven to be more newcomer-harsh. CSS, for example, is impossible to do well in without a good, fast hand. It took me a lot of learning to really get down having to stare at my minimap for teammates and known enemies while simultaneously watching for terrorist heads to fire at. I also had to learn the proper use of every weapon in the game, which can take a while as well. On the contrary, a game like TF2 has a fairly short barrier to entry. A new player doesn't even have to learn all the classes. Valve has successfully reduced the barrier to just a small brick step for every class. If you are really slow at learning a new class, you could just learn one and stick to it. While everyone will want to learn all the classes eventually, these small steps make it very easy for a newcomer to get right into the fight without feeling completely lost.

Community

The community of an online game can make or break the game for a lot of people. This is one area that I have seen almost every online FPS fail at, and it is sad because it is not entirely the developer's fault. They could have made a great game, but just because they didn't include a good enough anticheat program or enough ways for people to help each other out their game becomes a trip to the park for younger players to learn new vocabulary words (and not good vocabulary either). "Mommy, what is a @%$*#%*!#?" I can see it now... In CSS, although the community is very hardcore, if you search a bit you can still find servers that advertise themselves as being newbie-friendly. You don't know if this is a trap, but meh. There are few ways that publishers can heal this burning hole in online game design, and I have a few tips. Players tend to get more personal if they can freely talk to everyone at once, and if no one is on their team (meaning that they can offend someone without consequences). There is a lot more flaming in an every-man-for-themself deathmatch than in a CTF match. Players also get more mad when they feel they are camped and they are quicker to point fingers at good players when their death count is on display for them to see. Especially when they also get a running overall kill/death (KD) ratio, this makes the game much more intense due to the player knowing that each death results in a permanent scar in their record. One more thing: an easy way to get a player mad is to have a feature that when someone humiliates them (a knife in the back, perhaps) on top of that you take something away from them that is of value. On the surface it sounds fun, but in practice it seems to cause more trouble than it is worth.

Closing Thoughts

A lot of people say that the multiplayer on COD4 is awesome, but I haven't had the good fortune to be able to try it at all yet. All I have is the demo, which people say is not a good representation of the game itself. I will get COD4 soon, I will. Can't really decide if I should get that or Assassin's Creed (PC) first. Anyway, I will continue to play online shooters, and I may post more on this blog about this topic if I think of something to say. Feel free to post comments, I haven't yet gotten any from someone I do not know. What? You want another picture? Ok, fine, here you go.