The secret of successful multiplayer games
The best memories I have about a multiplayer game are from a game called Natural-Selection created in 2002. Ten years later they released Natural-Selection2 and the new version did not take off.
Here is why.
I started playing online in 1997 at the age of 11, with the beta version of Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal-Tournament, Day of Defeat… only on PC and in various teams.
So this article will focus on multiplayer games, which the final purpose is esport. It means games that last for many years, are played by a lot of people, have line-ups in all multigaming teams like Millenium and are streamed on Twitch.tv.
At the end it turns out that ingredients to create a successful game are not far from a successful app/startup.
Graphics: less is more
Try to play Crysis 3 online, and you get a headache in 5 minutes.
Gamers don’t play online to live an immersive experience but to compete and fight against other people, so every graphic effects that won’t help them win should be used carefully. The moves have to be as fluid as possible.
The first Half-Life mods were almost all successful games (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Natural Selection…) but their second version haven’t all been as successful as the first one.
Your ennemies should take their bullets when you want to, there is no room for a FX lag. That’s why pro gamers turn off every shadow effects and needed 5 years to switch to Counter-Strike Source.
The first who understood this is Team Fortress 2, instead of adding realism and crazy light effects, they used a cartoon style and only kept the minimum.
This has been prooved by Trackmania over Need for Speed, by Borderlands, and now Minecraft.
I already hear you saying “Realistic games like Call of Duty and Battlefield are successful too !”. In fact, not really, they need to release a new game every 2 years with always new stuff in it (cars, weapons…) to keep their active gamers and are not played in esport.
The last huge fail is Battlefield Hardline, it’s Counter-Strike with the realism of Battlefield ! They surely did not understand the CS lesson…. that leads us to the identity ingredient.
The identity
The identity is what makes your game different from others, it can be the game play, the number of players on the map, the mechanics, the atmosphere…
The reason why World of Warcraft is still here, it’s because it’s World of Warcraft !
The reason why Battlefield 4 is not dead yet, it’s because it’s the only one realistic FPS that can handle 64 gamers on the same map without much problems. This is the identity of BF4.
The reason why Starcraft 2 is not dead yet, it’s because it’s the only one RTS that has 3 races perfectly balanced, so it’s viable for competition.
The reason Minecraft is successful it’s because what matters is not what you see but what you do.
The first takes it all
Like every new disruptive ideas, the first on the market takes it all.
League of Legends made a game out of the Warcraft3 “tower attack” mod DotA and killed DotA2, Heroes of the Storm and Smite even before they were finished.
Another example is how everyone failed to compete with World of Warcraft: Warhammer Online, Guild Wars… even with a strong identity.
Having fluid experience, a unique identity and being first on the market is not enough to stay on the top. The last ingredient is bringing changes.
Little changes, every year
To keep your gamers active, they need new things often, most games bring changes by adding maps, but the trend is now by adding almost everything even in FPS.
The business model of League of Legend is just that, selling you new and cheated characters, then they get nerfed, so you buy the new ones.
Be careful ! Team Fortress 2 added too much stuff: random items loot, crafting, skins… and killed the game by selling their souls instead of focusing on esport maps.
This is also the Call of Duty business model, every game brings a lot of new experiences, cars, boats, planes, weapons… now that you have jumped of an orbital station they should wonder what to add !
The perfect game ?
Blizzard is working on a new game called Overwatch, which looks like having all ingredients to be an esport star:
- simple and colorful graphics
- a new concept: a mix between League of Legend and Team Fortress 2
- you can expect new maps and characters often because the characters list is already long
Potential issues:
- the identity of characters is too close to TF2 and LoL
- adding too much characters won’t help to balance the game, which is required to be played in esport
- selling new characters every weeks like LoL makes me furious: if you stop playing for 2 months you don’t understand the game anymore
My wishlist
Ok now I will ask Santa what I would like to see: World of GTA.
World of Warcraft is very old, it’s time to launch a serious new MMO.
GTA 5 is a good solo game but horrible online: many bugs due to latency between players, too long to load, hackers…
Here is what ingredients should have World of GTA:
- incredibly fluid experience, less effects if you can’t handle it
- lot people in the street, not 5 like today, guys I know this is one of the hardest thing to sync online
- giant new city every 2 years (NYC, Paris, Bali ? …)
- FPS style only, except in cars
- hard to get money, expensive weapons and cars…
- 4 teams: cops, business people, gangsta, politics
- doing bad things in the game should be punished very hard, so you get adrenalin when things go wrong
Special message to the Natural Selection dev team: Thank you for the first version of the game, if you could please turn the v2 into a cartoon style like TF2 it should help the mechanics of the game and attract gamers. It’s a tactical game, not a RPG.
