Innovative multiplayer design can be built atop underlying mechanics that don’t necessarily even need to be iterative – they can simply be reused.
Most contemporary multiplayer (especially in the AAA space) is repetitive. Shoot this, capture that, win the match – etc. Because of the (human) nature of such multi-player experience this does – don’t get me wrong – provide a lot scope for a lot of fun gameplay. But we can only change the scenery so many times.
However, a couple of recent stand-out multi-player (featuring) titles have used this to their advantage. Instead of re-inventing the core, they left it as is and created a novel multi-player experience on top of it.
Left 4 Dead took what Valve had already perfected in the Half Life engine and underlying systems and added a fixed-build co-op setup (4 players, with 2-4 being either human or companion AI) and truck-loads of pretty stupid – and pretty terrifying – zombies. The result: a survival co-op experience that forces the player to work as a team and co-operate with their companions to succeed (which, funnily enough is exactly how the gameplay is packaged: 4 strangers meet under unknown circumstances and are forced to work together else die alone). This “forced” nature that I’m getting at isn’t a player-1-press-this-while-player-2-presses-that – it’s completely emergent; founded in the fact there’s a lot of zombies and as well as acting as bait while your buddies take out the tank… you’re also going to need to be helped up every time one of them jumps you.
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood does something very similar with an emotive multiplayer experience that we wrote about last week. It uses the solid foundation of its ancestry (and many stealth action games that went before - see above) as the platform for a competitive multi-player game mode that on reflection is obvious – and ends up with you needing (not being forced) to play the role of an assassin in order to succeed.
So?
So, they stand out because they do something new – both provide an emergent role-playing (note the lower case “r” and “p” there) experience by offering novel game design atop solid genres, building further on the inherent emergent properties of multi-player games.
As well as providing new multi-player experiences, embellishing well-trodden genres with your own magic sparkle gets around the risk of un-polished (or outright un-tested) underlying mechanics (there’s really no excuse for this in the FPS/TPS genre): all you have to test - and perfect - is the sparkle.
You don’t need to re-invent the wheel to provide a new and interesting multi-player experience. Use what you know – just do *something funky with it.
There’s still a lot for multiplayer games to explore in the emotive space... at least that’s how it feels after recently experiencing the novel multiplayer experience presented in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.
We’d written a little about Brotherhood in a post last week, but on getting into the detail discovered that there’s something very interesting going on in the multi-player experience. The game carves out a multiplayer mode based not on the conventions and received wisdom of its contemporaries (those being other AAA titles) but based on a gameplay experience that has been evolved and perfected over the series*.
As a result of this, the gameplay experience delivered by Brotherhood’s multiplayer mode is nerve-wracking, tense and thrilling. And it’s all of those things because of the clever way other human players are introduced into the game world established by the single-player Assassin’s Creed experience.
If you’ve not played it, the best introduction is probably seeing it in action:
Some from-the-horse’s-mouth (well, actually a Goose in this case) observations:
Ignoring the ridiculous wait times (I timed 19 minutes on one occasion) to get into the game, the level of tension generated in the Brotherhood multiplayer experience is second to none. To be successful in a match you must act swiftly to score as you are competing to finish top of the leader board. This works contrary to you having to behave in a calm manner so as to avoid detection by the player you are hunting. This juxtaposition is heightened by the fact you are sometimes being stalked by many opponents - and other players may also be tracking your target, increasing the necessity to locate and dispatch your prey quickly and quietly. On a number of occasions I’ve witnessed a player break cover and assassinate his target only to be brutally stabbed in the face a split second later.
The chaos that ensues when a player acts inappropriately can at times be both frightening and hilarious: you may find yourself calmly walking amongst a crowd approaching your prey - lining yourself up for the perfect kill - and then, for no apparent reason, the calm is shattered as someone nearby starts to run. At this point it becomes a true test of nerves. There are many reasons the character may be running: they could be under chase; they may be after your kill; they may be coming to kill you, or; it may just be the AI fucking with you and there’s nothing wrong. Either way, at this point, nine times out of ten the majority of players in the area panic and scatter, some will die, others will escape but your perfectly lined up kill has gone and you must steady your nerve and begin again. The level of concentration this demands is so much more than in most multi-player experiences and the depth of emotional involvement it demands is truly mind bending. Never before have I played a multi-player game that has the player so engaged that the emotive drive actually parallels the events occurring on screen. Whilst from a tactical point of view it may help to have a soldier-like mind set while playing the latest Call of Duty, at no point do you actually feel like you are a soldier or part of a unit. The level of distrust and suspicion of everything in your environment goes a long way to making you feel like an assassin in Brotherhood.
As mentioned before the overall mood of the game is generated by its conflicting pace, this however does open it up to criticism as at times the second greatest frustration raises it’s head, on a number of occasions I have found myself with no target for various reasons and at points the time it takes for the player to be assigned a new target can be quite lengthy. When playing a game when the suspension of disbelief is anchored around its pacing this problem is quite a large one if for no other reason that you can’t ecru points and maintain your position on the leader board if you have no targets to kill... especially if other players are racking up kills during this down time.
There are a number of issues in the game play’s architecture and design though – primarily that the issuing of targets isn’t consistent (i.e. it can take you a lot longer to be allocated a new target than your competition). At these points the attitude towards the game can be adversely affected. In some instances the focus can easily switch from the cloak-and-dagger approach intended and generally desirable to a “shit... I really need to get a quick few kills to regain my place on the leader-board”-type attitude. This negative change in attitude often sends a ripple through the other players’ behavior. If for whatever reason players start dashing around to grab quick kills, the atmosphere of stalking-while-being-stalked quickly dissipates and the mood becomes more brawl than a battle of wits and holding of nerve. On the whole though these situations are rare and the game really draws the player into a unique and innovative style of game play that – no insignificant feat considering the vast array of design variables involved multi-player game play.
What next?
Playing a Call of Duty or Halo game in a multiplayer mode does provide a challenging and changing experience because of the nature (and varied skill sets) of human player opponents – and how they behave differently from AI opponents. Brotherhood relies on this differentiated behavior (of human-played characters over AI characters) in order to drive it’s game play. It’s like a sequence of inverted Turing tests – convince the human that you’re a computer.
The recent popularity of bot modes in AAA titles (e.g. Firefight in Halo: Reach) already highlights that players are interested in multi-player experiences that do rely on there not being human players as opponents (it wouldn’t be possible to organize and coral so many human players into a horde-like attack of the opposing team). But, whilst interesting – and a lot of fun, it’s no co-incidence that the heavily-human-player-behavior reliant experience of Brotherhood is also an emotive one. What else can we do to drive such emotive responses?
* I’ve not played it myself yet, but according to all accounts a lot of what’s good about the behavior-based tensions and skill in Brotherhood is also born out in Chris Hecker’s upcoming SpyParty.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 10:45PM 
