What’s our obsession with player numbers? WoW has 10million subscribers, Second Life has around 60,000 people logged inat once and Planetside has 3, all stuck in a Mexican standoff. Eve had, at its high point today 41,444 online for its western servers and 3,862 for it’s Chinese one. When I was playing Eve today I think I talked to 25 different people.
The other game I played today was Burnout Paradise, a decidedly non-massively multiplayer game. In fact the highest number of people that can be playing together at once is a mighty eight players. The strange thing is that the way that it presents this multiplayer experience that I think that some games might be able to learn from.
For those who don’t know Burnout is a series of games in which you drive around and cause crashes. That’s a gross oversimplification of the game in some respects but it sums up the premise. Needless to say it’s a game of particular genius that is some of the most online fun that you can have with your clothes on. The thing is that the latest version of the game is, without a doubt, heavily instanced. And yet there are no lobbies for you to choose to group. You just flick a switch and it joins you (in one of the online game mores) into an ongoing 8 player session, filling in the spaces of anybody who has dropped out recently. And that’s it, you’re in their instance exactly where you were a second ago, but with 7 other arrows on the map all driving around trying to score points by drifting, jumping or driving down the wrong side of the road. At some point the leader of the session decides to call a race and you’re all moved to the race start point, given and end point and you all scramble across the city trying to find the best route to get there. When the races finish you all go back to freeform points scoring until the next event is called. It’s quite a liberating way of doing online games, the game session only ends when the leader quits (which I think is a shame, the person with the next highest points should become leader, but that would screw up the leaderboards so maybe that’s why they didn’t do that) and any people that drop out are filled by the next batch of people who have hit join game on their controller.
Now, I don’t know how many people have brought this game but since I was playing on Xbox Live I have a list of my friends and options to jump into instances with them as well as the option to jump into a pool of people which I’m sure is larger than even second life or Eve’s maximum concurrent user numbers. What’s more I assume it’s using the Xbox’s ability to rate every player’s skill and join you into a game of people who have a similar ability as you do.
I’m reminded of Van Hemlock’s adventures through Guild Wars here. He and a friend played through the plot how you’re probably meant to. Imagine that you could call up a mission and the game would rate the players on how they play and provide you with a pick up group that matched your play style. Most people would end up min/maxing their way through, but the successful (read uber min/max) people get grouped with the other successful players, the casuals with the casuals and the (and this is where it gets funny) the griefers with the griefers. Of course people can progress up to the next level through experience as they learn, the Xbox does this now but then again Microsoft have invested a lot into this, and it’s one of their selling points over the PS3 and non-Live enabled PC games.
Yes, this system is the same as an MMO that runs a PvP area constantly with people dropping in and out as needed to keep the numbers up, but no MMO can guarantee enough concurrent players in order to make this work quite so seamlessly with the population being full on each instance. The answer is, of course, a new server design and some strides have been made towards this by games such as Eve (one shard) and WoW’s cross Realm Battlefields, but the Burnout Paradise experience feels just right. Forget the fact that it’s on a console, that’s just the market that they went for. The user experience is what MMOs should learn from.
The heresy of a console game being able to teach an MMO how to do something better is probably too much for most people, but burnout does a fine job of looking like an MMO without being one. Imagine what could be done if it was... Could it have even have made Auto Assault work? It’s the most direct comparison, driving game to driving game. Could it make PvP better in some games? Would it be a good idea for Factional Warfare in Eve? All I know is that I’ve felt like I’ve been in a bigger game with 8 players maximum than if I had been playing a lot of MMOs.
posted @ Sunday, January 27, 2008 11:30 PM