Crossover multiplayer

[Forbin]

Some developers like Ken Levine have been outspoken on the negative impact of building a multiplayer component to your game. Even if you're building on a robust engine it steals developer hours, and can mean the difference between a good single player experience, and a great one. What's even worse is that most games are shipping with the same modes that were popular in the 90s, and could never possibly build up a community to support online play for more than a couple months.

What do you think of the idea of a common arena multiplayer component that any game could package into their game? Developers don't spend their time making a huge lineup of maps, and building an engine, they just add their own custom models and a weapon or two to an existing game. They could focus on making one really fun map that represents their game and add it to the rotation that everyone plays.

TF2 has played around with cosmetic crossover pieces. People who bought Sam & Max have bunny ears, Alien Swarm players an alien, Worms players get some holy hand grenades. WoW players get special pets if they bought the collectors edition of StarCraft 2. Xbox players get Avatar clothing for buying games and completing achievements. I think it shows the potential marketing opportunities of crossover gaming.

If a company like Epic, made a simple arena deathmatch multiplayer game that was free to play on top of a popular engine like UE3, studios could use it as an excuse to advertise their game, and get a multiplayer experience without having to dedicate a bunch of artists and developers to full time multiplayer development.

Even if the game was fun, and developers were convinced to participate, I can think of two major hurdles. First, would be the question of who is the gatekeeper. The game doesn't really need to be super balanced, but you wouldn't want somebody to create Oddjob with a rail gun. And if you structure it so the majority of custom coding is scripted in the maps, you don't have to worry much about a developer pushing out a bad build that breaks everyone else's game, but then again would want to control how much content they push out. The second major hurdle would be IP control, even if the stars aligned some executive would prefer it if you did not put Mickey Mouse in a crossover death match arena.

Ultimately I think the only people that could pull it off are platform holders.

[Salacious Snake]

Clearly, the answer lies in PlayStation Home.

OK, I know that sounds like a dismissive joke answer, but I'm sure if you posed this idea to Cade Peterson (one of the guys on the Home team) he'd get super excited. He's also just a generally excitable guy. They are integrating more actiony game stuff into Home (like the Sodium games) and they're all about unlocking things from the games that you play.

It's actually weird how many current games unlock things in Home that you'd never know about, because nobody really promotes it or makes a bullet point out of it.

[Forbin]

Clearly, the answer lies in PlayStation Home.

OK, I know that sounds like a dismissive joke answer, but I'm sure if you posed this idea to Cade Peterson (one of the guys on the Home team) he'd get super excited. He's also just a generally excitable guy. They are integrating more actiony game stuff into Home (like the Sodium games) and they're all about unlocking things from the games that you play.

It's actually weird how many current games unlock things in Home that you'd never know about, because nobody really promotes it or makes a bullet point out of it.

That's why I believe a platform holder could potentially pull it off. Marketing teams are already successful at giving xbox avatars halo helmets, and creating rooms in Home. On a simple level you could pull something off like a cart racer, but I really think you could make a shooter arcadey enough to work.

[elmuerte]

First of all, it doesn't fix the problem. Somebody still has to build it, somebody has to put effort into it. And who's going to pay for that. Secondly, not all multiplayer modes are the same. You have different weapons, different movement, different flow, and different abilities in pretty much most games that have a deathmatch multiplayer component. These things need tweaking so that it becomes workable.

ps, Epic included a rudimentary (team) deathmatch with their engine that is free to be used by all licensees. And in most cases they do use it and extend it in various ways. And that's the stuff you often play.

Anyway, I don't care for multiplayer in games. I rather they spend the time on the single player experience.

[Salacious Snake]

Anyway, I don't care for multiplayer in games. I rather they spend the time on the single player experience.

That's exactly the point of what Forbin is talking about. And in terms of who pays for it, in the case of the PS Home example, it would be Sony. They have a pretty vested interest in adding value to to PlayStation 3 games, which this would do in sort of a weird way.

Obviously, the games that are built to have their own interesting multiplayer modes would keep on doing that, but those that barely tweak a basic deathmatch scenario could simply not bother.

edit: I think this idea is mainly aimed at the games that add a throwaway multiplayer mode that generally sucks and nobody cares about, but they only create because they want the bullet point. Like the Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena multiplayer. Having a generic shooter where you could unlock a Riddick model would have been a better value than the junk they included with that game, and there would be more than 3 people playing it, since it wouldn't just be a portion of the audience who bought that one game.

[Raff]

I don't think I like this idea. Multiplayer FPS games may be using a lot of the same modes as they did 20 years ago, but anyone who's played a few will know that the good ones vary massively in their mechanics. If I'm going to play a multiplayer FPS at all it'll be a ground-up specially designed one with its own unique mechanics. Why would I want to play an inherently generic husk of a game with Metro 2033 themed hats in it?

It is a valid issue you're trying to address, but I don't think it's a massive concern. More and more singleplayer-focused FPS' aren't bothering with multiplayer, and there are still quite a few multiplayer-only shooters coming out despite a lot of high profile flops.

[Salacious Snake]

Yeah, leaving out the multiplayer altogether is a good option too. But hey, why not also have the Metro 2033 hat thing? It's not appealing to people like us (if I may be forgiven a broad and probably incorrect generalization), but that sort of shit has been very successful in general.

As someone who reviews games, I've done a lot of grumbling when loading up a multiplayer mode and trying to find the one other person on Earth playing it for the sake of completeness, when I know it's tacked on for no reason. I think for those cases I'd rather get the themed headgear.

You're right though, that this phenomenon is in decline. For a while there, every goddamn game under the sun had to have a deathmatch mode, even if it didn't fit the rest of the game at all.

[Forbin]

I'd say the good ones these days don't really do that much differently. But my intent was to thin the heard of the modes that neither the developers or the players seem interested in.

As to elmuerte's thought that development time would be the same. The idea is that a developer would create a character model (which probably exists in their game assets anyways), maybe a gun model (which would again most likely exist), a simple definition file/LUA script to define gun behaviour from existing interfaces, and maybe a map or two to show off the level design of your game. That would certainly be less work than having to put together multiple maps, deal with net code and matchmaking systems, and all the other garbage that comes as part of even creating a UE3 game or Source mod.

Maybe writing the post right after I woke up wasn't a great idea.

[Lu]

Not quite ripe yet.