The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming
Bastard beta testing!
By Brad Wardell
"BLECH! THAT SUCKED!" That is the typical reaction
when someone first plays their favorite game for the first time
on-line.
Why? Because every game with multiplayer is actually two games.
What a deal! The first game is the one you paid for. The second
game is the on-line game in which you play the game totally for
maximizing winning, which often means playing the game totally differently
than one would intuitively or logically expect.
For instance, imagine a baseball game in which, by chance, if the
pitcher hits the batter with the ball, the batter has a 50% chance
of being disabled for the rest of the game. In single player against
the computer, you would play the game in the spirit of baseball.
But on-line you would quickly discover that every time one of your
decent hitters goes to bat, he would get nailed in the head by your
opponent's pitcher thus putting him out of the game. What the heck?
Welcome to the world of on-line gaming.
I suspect that that there's a lot of crying going on when some
game designer discovers how people actually play the game (and win)
on-line. That RTS game with 50 different units and great combined
arms turns into a simple tank rush game because it turns out that
if you have 50 of a particular unit you're unstoppable. Some minute
game design flaw totally changes the way it's done.
I remember when I was in the PGL playing Total Annihilation. There
was a map called Coast to Coast, consisting of two pieces of land
separated by water. The game designers thought this was a naval
map; build ships, dominate the seas, and then do a land invasion.
But in PGL, we didn't build ships. We built missile defenders against
ships on our land and walked our commander over early on to wreak
havoc on the enemy base, far away from their commander. And then
we walked back knowing that we'd put them behind far enough that
by the time they were starting to do well, our Big Bertha would
be complete and we'd lay waste to their base and end the game. The
poor defeated player was totally angry that we never even built
a ship the entire game but still won.
Cont'd
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