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“Online” is the power word of this gaming generation. From game producer’s eyeing the massive mountain of repeatable income that World of Warcraft produces to Microsoft’s emphasis on Xbox Live with their next-gen console – it’s a checkbox that publishers are keen to tick off. Draw-dropping graphics….check. Action-oriented and appeals to casual demographics…check. Multiplayer…check. Sorry, what was that? It doesn’t make much sense to have a 32-player deathmatch mode in a story-driven RPG? Who cares? It looks good on the back of the box – and remember that other game that didn’t have multiplayer – yeah, that one - the one where that big review site listed “No Multiplayer” as the only con…we don’t want that again. Ooh – take out the “story-driven RPG” bit and that fixes the problem!
In fairness to publishers, it’s a feature the gaming public wants and its success is proven. The problem: it isn’t suited to deep, traditional RPGs. You know – those things we had before the industry converted entirely to action/RPGs, which – funnily enough – are often quite well suited to multiplayer.
Some of you are poised, fingers over the keyboard like poison daggers, to vehemently disagree or point out the success of Neverwinter Nights. I agree…but NWN is the exclusion that proves the rule. I’m not against multiplayer as such - I’m against multiplayer just for the sake of it.
There are a multitude of reasons why MP is a problem for more complex, story-focused RPGs. Development time and resources need to be allocated to the basic multiplayer code, interfaces need to be designed and issues such as quest continuity (what happens if player B has the Sword of Sirius in their inventory but doesn’t play the next session?) need to be addressed. Nothing insurmountable but these resources are not being spent on other content.
The bigger issue is one of focus and direction. I played NWN for over a year with a great group of players from RPGDot. I had some brilliant roleplaying experiences, in no small part due to the quality of the other players and creativity of a good DM. Even so, dialogue-heavy modules sometimes became bogged down. Ultimately, since someone needs to interact with the NPCs and make decisions, it becomes their roleplaying experience with the other players relegated to combat support roles. Sophisticated checks such as stat, race, sex or factional standing (rare enough in RPGs as it is) become less meaningful or even pointless. Decisions and branching plot-lines become less important than the shared experiences among the players. Designers can respond by shifting the focus away from the impact an individual character makes on the gameworld to something a little more generic and linear, so the content remains meaningful to a player who joins one session – or focus on combat/action. MMO players will know this is exactly what MMORPGs do – there are social interactions between players but the only meaningful interaction between groups and the gameworld is combat-oriented.
Some of these issues can be partially – but not entirely - resolved with the right design, which is why NWN works fairly well. It’s why I have hope that Dragon Age, with its separate dedicated multiplayer campaign will work. And it’s why MP works in action/RPGs, where complex NPCs interactions are eschewed for the excitement of team combat dynamics. It’s certainly something that needs to be carefully and cleverly designed at the basic concept level, rather than bolting on during development or you end up with a crappy game and crappy, pointless multiplayer.
If you want a co-op or multiplayer, there are whole genres devoted to it – so please, leave the tiny handful of non-action single-player RPGs alone.
What do you think? Love it or hate it? Does the importance of multiplayer gaming to the market adversely impact the number or type of RPGs made? Or is multiplayer a potential tool that RPGs should embrace to extend their audience? We’d love to hear your comments. |
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Side Quest: Multiplayer Blues
