Home, and the Rise of Multiplayer Gaming
by CheekyGuy, HSM team writer
As of this writing, there’s been a considerable surge of quality multiplayer games, with Sony VASG’s Cutthroats, VEEMEE’s No Man’s Land, and Juggernaut’s MiniBots being some of the most popular titles to come out of Home, all following in the steps of Hellfire Games’ Novus Prime and Lockwood’s Sodium2.
I’m a guy that comes home from work pretty much burned out, and the last thing that I want to play is something incredibly heavy that invests a lot of time and effort to work through. Sure, when I was at school or college I worked my way through action and adventure titles; the original Metal Gear Solid games got me hooked to a point where my college work kinda took a back seat. I still graduated; it just took a while. University was the same.
What I want from a multiplayer game on Home is simplicity; I want to be able to pick up my joypad and play it, without working through a massive tutorial in order to play. If I have to work too hard in order to play something, it’s a turnoff for me. It took a lot of guts and determination for me to even play Red Dead Redemption — and that’s just the single-player story mode.
I’m the kid from an arcade amusement park that’s used to playing games with less than six buttons, I’ve grown up with the hideous “claw” controller from a Nintendo 64, and got all kinds of excited with PlayStation’s DualShock controller. I mostly take educated guesses on what the controls are for each game I play. Yeah, I’m that typical guy that doesn’t read instructions for any do-it-yourself construction setup, only to see my end result of a shelving unit crash to the floor. I want to be able to pick my joypad up and play without working too hard. I want to instantly be able to jump right in and play.
What I love about multiplayers in general is that the story mode and character exposition are now out of the way, so you can just concentrate on the gameplay. It’s a little like the recent Avengers movie: all the superheroes justfight each other — which, ironically, is so true to the comic books, with their “versus” storylines.
The Sega Dreamcast, released in 1999
Just keep it simple: there’s your opponents (humans, aliens, robots, a different team color, whatever they are), and here’s YOUR team (whatever race of creature, or color team), and you just both get it on! Shooter or scrapfest. Who cares. Voice chat or VOIP is a great addition, too; I love talking to the team I’m playing with, or even going up against, one on one.
What excited me about online gameplay when it was first introduced — arguably, back in 1999, the Sega DreamCast was the first console to truly achieve this — was that you didn’t have to go looking in the real world for somebody to play with you, and I got such a buzz that not only was I playing against or with a real human being, but the fact that the human being in question possibly lived on the other side of the world!
Online gaming just makes the world such a smaller place. But in a good way.
Home, with its current games, should allow more than ten people at a time to play one another, simultaneously. Yes, there are memory restrictions; but let’s face it, Cutthroats works because you can cram up to twenty-four people into the game.
Co-op play is also welcome with online gameplay; there could be neat puzzles that players can use teamwork to solve. I love that an RPG will soon be available to play in Home. Whether this has multiplayer capability for the future is yet to be seen, but one can hope. Multiplayer experiences bring the Home community much closer. It can be taken into any number of directions. For those of you that were around as early adopters of the original PlayStation 3, Xi was a fantastic ARG Home game that was part detective, part trivia and part puzzler which brought an entire Home community together to solve the mystery. Some players were faster than others at working their way through the game; ask anyone who was here during Home’s earliest days of open beta, and they still remember this game. Though there is little doubt that ARG titles are costly to develop, Xi is so far the only title which fulfilled Home’s PR tagline of making Home itself a game.
Juggernaut Games’ MiniBots: a take-anywhere third-person shooter in an active item!
I’m loving Juggernaut Games’ MiniBots; it’s an instantly accessible game to play. It can be played in virtually any private space that you can place it, as it adapts to the playing area you use. There is a gentle learning curve from it with the computer AI, so you won’t get frustrated so easily and throw your pad across the room. Not that I do this, of course. And now Juggernaut’s adding a multiplayer edition, which is a really nice incentive to go and get this game now. It would be crazy to pass this up. There is always that addictive, “Just one more go” feel about this game. It’s noCall of Duty, but it does pay homage to the much earlier days of gaming.
With games like this and Cutthroats being just a part of some of the big multiplayer titles out on Home to play, you get the sense that the technology running Home’s core client is finally sophisticated enough to allow for some truly interesting gaming experiences that play to Home’s greatest strength: bringing people together.
July 5th, 2012 by CheekyGuy | 2 comments
CheekyGuy is a loveable, mischievous Brit who first entered virtual reality via Second Life, and now frequents Home as a Grey Gamer to keep in touch with friends. In real life, Cheeky is a video editor who has just completed a Master's degree in screenwriting from Liverpool John Moores University.
Nice article Cheeks, and I agree that Homes games need to bring people together to keep them interesting, that and a good reward system is a sure win.
The problem I have with MP gaming, ironically, is other people! You have a few sets of people you will find in ANY online MP game.
1st is the die-hards; the people that LIVE in that game, they know every square inch of every map, every spawn point and every trick of the trade. These are the ones who make it hardest for casual players to enter the game for any length of time, and ultimately, put people off.
2nd are the noobs, the people who aren’t just unfamiliar with the game in question, but a control pad on the whole (“Oh! I didn’t see that button!”). These are the ones scraping faces off walls, standing still wondering what’s going on as they get repeatedly shot in the face. The ones who are more than useless when they end up on your team, to the point of being detrimental to you and your team mates.
3rd are the I-Don’t-Cares. The people that will shoot team mates in the back “for a laugh”, the ones who’ll give away positions because it’s apparently “funny”, who basically go around causing as many problems as possible because they’re “bored”. GAAAHHH!
And lastly, the the middle-breed. The ones who know what’s going on but are stuck with super-pros and cannon fodder. And that’s just a horrible place to be.
There are so many games in my collection that sit with a 70 or 80% “completion” count because they insist that doing everything in the main story isn’t good enough to qualify as playing the game that it depresses me. And so does basic etiquette within MP gaming. Nice read, but count me out!