For years, offline and online components have been at war, fighting for the time and cash of developers, publishers and players alike with all the ferocity of colonial powers carving up a fertile continent. Single and multiplayer modes are often created by distinct teams - one internal and there from the outset, the other external and shuttled in last-minute - who are obliged to draw from the same resource pool and do battle over the project's creative emphasis. Occasionally the fracas makes headlines, as when Spec Ops: The Line designer Cory Davis referred to that game's competitive aspect as a "cancerous growth" that "sheds a negative light on all of the meaningful things we did in the single-player experience". Exactly which side of the equation has the upper hand is hard to determine - games with multiplayer components sell more, we're often told by laconic brand managers, but they also seem to attract more in the way of controversy, as fans muddle through seemingly inevitable launch-week connection problems, or bemoan bitty DLC offerings and pass-locked content. Adding online features has become equivalent in the popular imagination with cashing in, with kowtowing to the dominance of Call of Duty - thanks in large part to the likes of Ken Levine, who are vocal in their disdain for "bolt-on" features.
Thus the troublesome present. The future may be rather different. Online modes won't exist in creative and commercial opposition to single player, as many now do - indeed, the concept of online as a distinct "mode" is rapidly approaching its sell-by date. Instead, online functionality will infest so-called single player. It will permeate your game, dogging you as ably and insidiously as a ghost dogs an obviously sacrificial, too-beautiful high school teen wearing short-shorts. It will arrive by way of neither big, clunky lobbies nor Facebook-style notifications. It will have sunk to the imaginative bedrock. It will be unnoticeable, and inescapable.
The seeds of this shift are prospering everywhere. Criterion popularised the whole asynchronous multiplayer gig with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, where you're constantly sucked back into the cockpit by the activities of online rivals, batted onto the game's dashboard by the celebrated Autolog service. The studio's Most Wanted reboot capitalises further on the idea, transforming those addictive pop-ups into billboards, traffic lights and speed cameras, real structures within its fiction. But by the time of the latter's release, the torch had passed to younger and more ambitious souls. Dark ones, to be precise.
Brilliantly, From Software's magnum opus turns online into a question of metaphysics - its multiplayer modes are Covenants, presided over by gods and godlings whose penchants and peccadilloes determine how and why players can meet. Pledge fealty to Nito, first of the dead, and you'll become an online plague-bearer, injecting super-sized foes into the worlds of random players, who must track down your sigil and slay you to lift the curse. Side with the Forest Hunters and their bizarre feline mistress, and you'll be called upon to defend a particular region from invaders. Lighting upon these Covenants means getting to the bottom of the game's lore, which is presumably why From talked about them so little in the run-up to release - and the result is a multiplayer community of uncommon hardiness, made up of people who've quested and fought for the privilege.
Oddly, given the popular view that the nation doesn't "do" online as comprehensively or intuitively as the West, Japan appears to be leading the way. Most notably, Capcom has tried its hand at all sorts of intriguing things in recent releases, perhaps drawing on the cooperative ethic it has nurtured with Monster Hunter. Dragon's Dogma is the obvious standout - the game's shareable AI companions are cast as a race of ethereal beings, indefatigably loyal to the Arisen. They also lend the world its civilian traffic, wandering the roads with gear on show in hopes of being recruited for an assault on the Ur-Dragon - a mind-boggling meta-beast that must be fought by thousands of players in parallel.
Capcom has also snuck online features into Resident Evil 6 and Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, where some missions see the game quietly reaching out over Xbox Live to other players at the same stage in the campaign, and introducing them in place of 'bots. The results aren't all that compelling, but their very superfluity speaks volumes about Capcom's commitment to online features that subtly form part of the campaign world - as does the lustrous "Deep Down" trailer, ear-marked by many as our first glimpse of Dragon's Dogma 2.
This kind of manoeuvring within a narrative context will, I suspect, become the focus next generation, as new platforms make connectivity the point, rather than an afterthought. Recent rumours portray the next Xbox as an always-online machine - a prospect that still strikes us as deeply dubious, but one that's admittedly implied by what we know of Microsoft's current first-party projects. Both Rare and Lionhead are rumoured to be working on cloud-based games - the one a physics sim of some kind, possibly Kinect Sports 3, the other a role-playing action affair that smells a lot like Fable 4.
Key third party projects also hint at the capabilities of forthcoming hardware. Bungie's Destiny is perhaps the most telling, an always-online shooter endowed with an obscenely huge budget, which aims to sneak additional players onto the stage of what feels nonetheless like a solo epic. The way Bungie is handling details of the game's factions, drip-feeding nuggets of backstory which are then appropriated and recoded by hungry fans, points to the extent to which the developer wants its community to interpenetrate with Destiny's world. Ubisoft's Watch Dogs - a game whose very premise all but obliges it to introduce persistent online features - is another suggestive example.
I find all this incredibly heartening. The notion of a "connected experience" has never been more contentious, thanks to EA's catastrophic handling of Sim City, and the sour whiff of imaginative bankruptcy that hangs over the likes of Tomb Raider's online component. The technical hurdles remain fearsome, and there's plenty of scope for suspicion about what the spectre of persistent online bodes for the pre-owned market and consumer rights in general. But Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls and Hot Pursuit show that as befits questions of design, at least, online doesn't have to be this planet-killing asteroid, smashed into otherwise complete and watertight games by greedy publishers. Hopefully, Destiny and the rest of the next gen crop will lay doubts about such practices to rest.
Source: OXM
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[h=3]References[/h]
Thanks to: Rheena.com
Thus the troublesome present. The future may be rather different. Online modes won't exist in creative and commercial opposition to single player, as many now do - indeed, the concept of online as a distinct "mode" is rapidly approaching its sell-by date. Instead, online functionality will infest so-called single player. It will permeate your game, dogging you as ably and insidiously as a ghost dogs an obviously sacrificial, too-beautiful high school teen wearing short-shorts. It will arrive by way of neither big, clunky lobbies nor Facebook-style notifications. It will have sunk to the imaginative bedrock. It will be unnoticeable, and inescapable.
The seeds of this shift are prospering everywhere. Criterion popularised the whole asynchronous multiplayer gig with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, where you're constantly sucked back into the cockpit by the activities of online rivals, batted onto the game's dashboard by the celebrated Autolog service. The studio's Most Wanted reboot capitalises further on the idea, transforming those addictive pop-ups into billboards, traffic lights and speed cameras, real structures within its fiction. But by the time of the latter's release, the torch had passed to younger and more ambitious souls. Dark ones, to be precise.
Brilliantly, From Software's magnum opus turns online into a question of metaphysics - its multiplayer modes are Covenants, presided over by gods and godlings whose penchants and peccadilloes determine how and why players can meet. Pledge fealty to Nito, first of the dead, and you'll become an online plague-bearer, injecting super-sized foes into the worlds of random players, who must track down your sigil and slay you to lift the curse. Side with the Forest Hunters and their bizarre feline mistress, and you'll be called upon to defend a particular region from invaders. Lighting upon these Covenants means getting to the bottom of the game's lore, which is presumably why From talked about them so little in the run-up to release - and the result is a multiplayer community of uncommon hardiness, made up of people who've quested and fought for the privilege.
Oddly, given the popular view that the nation doesn't "do" online as comprehensively or intuitively as the West, Japan appears to be leading the way. Most notably, Capcom has tried its hand at all sorts of intriguing things in recent releases, perhaps drawing on the cooperative ethic it has nurtured with Monster Hunter. Dragon's Dogma is the obvious standout - the game's shareable AI companions are cast as a race of ethereal beings, indefatigably loyal to the Arisen. They also lend the world its civilian traffic, wandering the roads with gear on show in hopes of being recruited for an assault on the Ur-Dragon - a mind-boggling meta-beast that must be fought by thousands of players in parallel.
Capcom has also snuck online features into Resident Evil 6 and Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, where some missions see the game quietly reaching out over Xbox Live to other players at the same stage in the campaign, and introducing them in place of 'bots. The results aren't all that compelling, but their very superfluity speaks volumes about Capcom's commitment to online features that subtly form part of the campaign world - as does the lustrous "Deep Down" trailer, ear-marked by many as our first glimpse of Dragon's Dogma 2.
This kind of manoeuvring within a narrative context will, I suspect, become the focus next generation, as new platforms make connectivity the point, rather than an afterthought. Recent rumours portray the next Xbox as an always-online machine - a prospect that still strikes us as deeply dubious, but one that's admittedly implied by what we know of Microsoft's current first-party projects. Both Rare and Lionhead are rumoured to be working on cloud-based games - the one a physics sim of some kind, possibly Kinect Sports 3, the other a role-playing action affair that smells a lot like Fable 4.
Key third party projects also hint at the capabilities of forthcoming hardware. Bungie's Destiny is perhaps the most telling, an always-online shooter endowed with an obscenely huge budget, which aims to sneak additional players onto the stage of what feels nonetheless like a solo epic. The way Bungie is handling details of the game's factions, drip-feeding nuggets of backstory which are then appropriated and recoded by hungry fans, points to the extent to which the developer wants its community to interpenetrate with Destiny's world. Ubisoft's Watch Dogs - a game whose very premise all but obliges it to introduce persistent online features - is another suggestive example.
I find all this incredibly heartening. The notion of a "connected experience" has never been more contentious, thanks to EA's catastrophic handling of Sim City, and the sour whiff of imaginative bankruptcy that hangs over the likes of Tomb Raider's online component. The technical hurdles remain fearsome, and there's plenty of scope for suspicion about what the spectre of persistent online bodes for the pre-owned market and consumer rights in general. But Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls and Hot Pursuit show that as befits questions of design, at least, online doesn't have to be this planet-killing asteroid, smashed into otherwise complete and watertight games by greedy publishers. Hopefully, Destiny and the rest of the next gen crop will lay doubts about such practices to rest.
Source: OXM
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[h=3]References[/h]
- [SUP]^[/SUP] Source: OXM (www.oxm.co.uk)
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Thanks to: Rheena.com
