The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming

Good Karma and multiplayer gaming

By Brad Wardell

I play multiplayer all the time. I can’t help it. I’m an addict. I need help. I need help for lots of other reasons too but that’s between me and my team of round-the-clock therapists…

I can tell you this: casual gamers will never embrace multiplayer strategy games as they’re currently designed. And the fact is, more and more developers are ignoring computer AI because they think multiplayer features somehow make up for them. Well they don’t.

There are 3 basic problems with on-line gaming:

1) The people. Too many people are so concerned with winning that they completely forget that the other player is a human being. There is a fundamental issue when people who may value their time very differently are thrust together randomly. Hidden behind their on-line personas, many people become vile and evil beyond belief.

2) The game mechanics. Too many game designers just plain suck at playing strategy games. The result is sloppy game mechanics waiting to be exploited. When you play these exploiters, the game is no longer played as it was originally imagined. The option for the player who wants to occasionally win is to either adopt those strategies or get creamed. The casual player can’t even imagine going into a game where he would need to build 15 tank factories when 2 tank factories were more than enough to beat the AI on the hardest setting. I remember playing in PGL for Total Annihilation and being disgusted with myself for squashing some good but naïve TA player on a map called Coast to Coast, which consisted of two tiny strips of land separated by water. The poor guy thought that you were supposed to build ships on that map – as the designers intended. Expert TA players had long discovered other ways to master that map which involved building no water units whatsoever.

3) Connection problems. Half the time you play one of these games, the person you’re playing with gets disconnected (or quits) midway through. And that’s after considerable time trying to get the game going in the first place. Any long-time multiplayer gamer knows the feeling of wasting a Saturday evening trying to get a decent game going, only to realize that the evening was spent without getting a single game finished.

So what can we do? There are tons of different options. Multiplayer can be really fun with very simple game mechanics. One of the most obvious solutions is to have simpler mechanics, or at least mechanics in which the designer knows exactly how they’re going to be used. I’m in the beta for a pretty good game whose final version will have literally hundreds of different units. It’s practically a half dozen strategy games rolled into one. I can’t even imagine how scary multiplayer is going to be in that.