Multiplayer is the future

[Puzz3D]

The magic of the game is not in the packaging or the graphics-- its in the gameplay. Why so many software companies don't get that is beyond me.

I think it is the flashy graphics that sells the game. There are more people playing RTW multiplayer right now than played any of the previous titles, and the MP battle doesn't even stay in sync. The SP game has something like 100 bugs, and it still got a 90% or better rating in every review except one which was 89%.

Total War is a commercial endevour, and the majority of the sales occur within a short time of initial release. The developer isn't trying to make the best gameplay or the longest life game, and given the good graphics in RTW the gameplay doesn't have to be as good as the previous titles. So, we get things like suicide generals and then a closeup cut sceen of him getting killed. That feature isn't an accident.

The title of this thread has the reason MP isn't the focus of Total War games. Multiplayer is the "future". It isn't the present. With CA now pursuing the mass market, that market determines what the game will be like.

[Duke John]

I only tried R:TW MP three times. The first time was before the patch, so I couldn't log on. The second time I logged on got into a game with no idea what the settings were (great feature!) and found out that it was 100K for a 1vs1. I immediately left and didn't bother to spend more time finding a proper game. The third time, I forgot to disconnect the router so I couldn't join games. With this thread in mind and all the other bugs I had already lost my appetite.

I'm not really a fervent MP player, but that is mostly because I'm spending too much time modding. I have the hopes that the Sengoku Jidai mod will catch on good enough so that I can finally just play MP games and occasionally a SP. I have the hopes that the patch 1.2 will fix alot of bugs. If that isn't the case, then I there is a big chance I will forget R:TW since I'm not going to spend hours and hours modifying a game that isn't working properly. The mod may look good, but if the gameplay isn't good then it's just a waste of time (but apparently that is not a view held by all...).

This may have sounded off topic, but it's the MP and gameplay aspect that keeps me modding TW. If it isn't patched correctly then I'm outta here.

[Swoosh So]

On the other side of the fence is BioWare's Neverwinter Nights. Five years of development created a game that tapped into a market that no one believed could exist. Explicitly designed to appeal to D&D players who wanted to bring the tabletop experience to the PC, NWN boasts ever-rising player numbers, with an average of 7500 players online at any given moment and 30,000 unique users logging on per day.



BioWare's gamble that a market for such a game exists and that independent content designers will deliver the goods paid off. Few, if any, other games permit end-users so much power over their own product. Many of the modules for Neverwinter Nights were better than the original campaign, and some rival the expansions in popular appeal and quality.

For revolutionizing multiplayer gaming, introducing multiplayer to RPGs and creating a new kind of community, Diablo and Neverwinter Nights share position Number 5 on FiringSquad's Top Multiplayer Games of All Time.


taken from firing squad website for best 10 pc games...

This could be a personal message to ca yet its just taken from the same site....

StarCraft

The game had staying power, because aside from the three uniquely balanced races, Blizzard actually took an interest in the game after release (what a concept!). They actively adjusted the game balance over a period of months and years after release and added enhancements and tweaks to the battle.net interface as well. It's amazing that many RTS games today still can't get matchmaking right, and it's five years after Blizzard provided the blueprint with Battle.net

hmm hmm

[Thrudvang]

I dont see why multiplayer is a must? 20 years from now nobody is going to be playing R:TW online, but people will still be playing the single player.

Multiplayer should remain as it is, a side option for people who want to play it, not the main focus of the game. When a game's main focus is on multiplayer there's no real point in buying it, all you can do it play it online until everyone stops playing it and then it just gathers dust.

Also, you can only do so much in multiplayer design, single player still gives limitless options.

And please, dont use FiringSquad. They overhype like crazy..

"On the other side of the fence is BioWare's Neverwinter Nights. Five years of development created a game that tapped into a market that no one believed could exist. Explicitly designed to appeal to D&D players who wanted to bring the tabletop experience to the PC, NWN boasts ever-rising player numbers, with an average of 7500 players online at any given moment and 30,000 unique users logging on per day."

It didnt bring any tabletop experience to the PC, it brought a shallow crappy game with a few (and mostly changed/broken) D&D rules slapped on. Not to mention all traces of a RPG missing.

"BioWare's gamble that a market for such a game exists and that independent content designers will deliver the goods paid off. Few, if any, other games permit end-users so much power over their own product. Many of the modules for Neverwinter Nights were better than the original campaign, and some rival the expansions in popular appeal and quality."

The original campaign was terrible and extremely dull and linear, taking a dump in the toliet can make something better than NWN's original campaign. There is probably a few good player made modules, but the engine is still total crap. Real time with horrible rule implementation still make the game suck. Can you say no cleric domains?

"For revolutionizing multiplayer gaming, introducing multiplayer to RPGs and creating a new kind of community, Diablo and Neverwinter Nights share position Number 5 on FiringSquad's Top Multiplayer Games of All Time."

Funny how neither is an RPG...

[hellenes]

I dont see why multiplayer is a must? 20 years from now nobody is going to be playing R:TW online, but people will still be playing the single player.

Multiplayer should remain as it is, a side option for people who want to play it, not the main focus of the game. When a game's main focus is on multiplayer there's no real point in buying it, all you can do it play it online until everyone stops playing it and then it just gathers dust.

Also, you can only do so much in multiplayer design, single player still gives limitless options.

And please, dont use FiringSquad. They overhype like crazy..

"On the other side of the fence is BioWare's Neverwinter Nights. Five years of development created a game that tapped into a market that no one believed could exist. Explicitly designed to appeal to D&D players who wanted to bring the tabletop experience to the PC, NWN boasts ever-rising player numbers, with an average of 7500 players online at any given moment and 30,000 unique users logging on per day."

It didnt bring any tabletop experience to the PC, it brought a shallow crappy game with a few (and mostly changed/broken) D&D rules slapped on. Not to mention all traces of a RPG missing.

"BioWare's gamble that a market for such a game exists and that independent content designers will deliver the goods paid off. Few, if any, other games permit end-users so much power over their own product. Many of the modules for Neverwinter Nights were better than the original campaign, and some rival the expansions in popular appeal and quality."

The original campaign was terrible and extremely dull and linear, taking a dump in the toliet can make something better than NWN's original campaign. There is probably a few good player made modules, but the engine is still total crap. Real time with horrible rule implementation still make the game suck. Can you say no cleric domains?

"For revolutionizing multiplayer gaming, introducing multiplayer to RPGs and creating a new kind of community, Diablo and Neverwinter Nights share position Number 5 on FiringSquad's Top Multiplayer Games of All Time."

Funny how neither is an RPG...

The only thing that you have to do is to go at the .COM (or even here) and see how many people are complaining about the RETARD "AI"...With a MP campaign youre getting a FREE Deep Blue as an opponent!!!!
While i understand the difficulty to change ones views his concepts and principles ANY company should work on the line of COMPETITION!!!
Do you actually know how MANY copies of RTW have been downloaded from emule/sold illegally? Why should a casual cutomer pay $50 for a game that will get BORING and there is NO MP? Does the CD key actually WORTH anything? And the whole "it cant be done its too complicated/none has done it before/too risky" makes me think: if all the people were thinking like that would i be typing this post in my pc? would my pc exist? Electricity?
All things aside the ACTUAL merge of RTS and RPG genres will lead imo into a tottaly new definition of the pc games market and will be copied/studied and even set as a paradigm...

Hellenes

[R'as al Ghul]

Is Multiplayer the future?
I think it's a great part of the future.
I came to Total War because I wanted strategy and tactics. I've always been a strategy gamer and actually bought Shogun because I knew the board game Shogun where you also had to conquer Japan on a province map. It's very similar.
At that time, my only MP experience was connected to 1on1 Console games, Lan-compatible games like UT or AoE and the like. When I started playing Shogun I couldn't play the 3D part because of my machines specs. It took a while until I could play this part of the game and it really became something new. But I didn't play MP until Medieval came out. It had again to do with my machine. When it was finally capable of running a 4vs4 custom I logged in to Shogun MP. This may sound silly but the atmosphere of Shogun, its whole Samurai-theme made it more attractive to me. Once logged in on a Monday evening I met people like ShinGaijin, Mimesaka, Kansuke and a lot of others who gave me the feeling to be really welcome, although I was a really bad player at that moment. But it gave me confidence to try Medieval MP, too. Well I have mixed feelings about Medieval, the Lobby was crowded with idiots, insulting each other and spamming the lobby into unreadability. I did some nice games, won some lost some but it didn't really catch me. The limited number of different armies and the almost impossibility to win with Turkish forces put an end to it. I returned to play some Nap Mod games, which was fun, but again not that good. It's also a question of time. I would often join the lobby to find a decent game and had to wait for an hour for the game while people dropped out of it, didn't join, took ages to build armies etc. In that time I could've played a few campaign battles.
BUT, after a while it's just no real challenge anymore. Well sometimes the AI could surprise you, but most of the time you would rule the field. So, the real challenge lies in MP and people want to be challenged. It's no fun if you can't loose and the ultimate fun is to compete against another human that you know nothing about except his nickname. You don't know what to expect.

The point I want to make is, that the SP part has to function properly and provide a challenging AI with tactical brains. All you really need for the MP part is a set of balanced playing pieces/ i.e. units. Like in chess. I may agree that it is up to the players community to develop the best settings for a balanced play but the rudimentary engine should provide the best start possible.
If you look at the development of computer games you can see that when computers started to communicate they started to play against each other. This development led to the idea of world-wide competition and rankings. Some console games do a very good job in this respect and I dare to say that any game that wants to be a classic has to be part of this development. Rome needs a good MP part to compete with other games. Even if the SP part would be perfect there would be the urgent wish to compete against other human players.

R'as

[Puzz3D]

I dont see why multiplayer is a must? 20 years from now nobody is going to be playing R:TW online, but people will still be playing the single player.

Play RTW SP for 20 years? I don't think so, and I doubt the game will even run on the hardware people will be using in 10 years. Multiplayer does have a limited lifespan for as long as the matchmaking server is available, but the multiplayer community is willing to move on to the each next game in the series as long as the quality of the gameplay is maintained.

We can talk about the desireability of adding a multiplayer campaign, but right now we are talking to a company that can't even maintain the quality of the battles only multiplayer. RTW has enough problems in both SP and MP that it could negatively impact sales of the add-on as well as the next game in the series.

[Maeda Toshiie]

MP wil foreverl last longer than SP. The main reason being that another human player will be a better opponent than the AI. Of course, that is IF the game is good enough, and not get tossed into the bin a few weeks after the player gets bored.

However, the MP side is not the profitable side of things. Maintaining multiplayer games require tech personnel, servers band bandwidth. All that is an ongoing cost. If the initial profits go to the dev of the game, what is to pay for the support of the multiplayers?

Starcraft is a very good example. I can imagine few would play for SP, but MP is still very much ongoing, even long after the release of WC3. Starcraft on BNet is bleeding money from Blizzard. It can hardly expect much current sales of such an old game, even when sold at rock bottom prices in bargain bins. Most of the profits come from the initial sales years ago. Tens of thousands are still playing it online. Seriously, many have really gotten their money's worth in that sense.

So basically, MP, if it truely becomes popular, reduces the profits. What they want are people to be suckered in to buy the game, play for a short while and ditch it for the next new release. So basically, flashiness is part of the business, because it suckers people to buy it. All that hype about the graphics. Wow, I can see glint from the armour! Whats that if the AI is stupid and the gameplay sucks?

Personally I am a believer of the KISS principle and also, if it aint broke, dont fix it.

Prior to the release of RTW, I had great respect for 3 companies: Blizzard, Valve and CA. Now it has gone down to 2.

CA might as well move off to the console market and sell its games there. No multiplayer to worry about.

[hellenes]

MP wil foreverl last longer than SP. The main reason being that another human player will be a better opponent than the AI. Of course, that is IF the game is good enough, and not get tossed into the bin a few weeks after the player gets bored.

However, the MP side is not the profitable side of things. Maintaining multiplayer games require tech personnel, servers band bandwidth. All that is an ongoing cost. If the initial profits go to the dev of the game, what is to pay for the support of the multiplayers?

Starcraft is a very good example. I can imagine few would play for SP, but MP is still very much ongoing, even long after the release of WC3. Starcraft on BNet is bleeding money from Blizzard. It can hardly expect much current sales of such an old game, even when sold at rock bottom prices in bargain bins. Most of the profits come from the initial sales years ago. Tens of thousands are still playing it online. Seriously, many have really gotten their money's worth in that sense.

So basically, MP, if it truely becomes popular, reduces the profits. What they want are people to be suckered in to buy the game, play for a short while and ditch it for the next new release. So basically, flashiness is part of the business, because it suckers people to buy it. All that hype about the graphics. Wow, I can see glint from the armour! Whats that if the AI is stupid and the gameplay sucks?

Personally I am a believer of the KISS principle and also, if it aint broke, dont fix it.

Prior to the release of RTW, I had great respect for 3 companies: Blizzard, Valve and CA. Now it has gone down to 2.

CA might as well move off to the console market and sell its games there. No multiplayer to worry about.

Is a small thing called e-mule bleeding the companies?
CD copying?
$5 for a *cough* ill-legal *cough* copy?
Why Blizzard focuses on MP?
Cause they are mazochists and want to lose money?
Who is more successful CA or Blizzard?

The answers are up to you...

Hellenes

[shingenmitch2]

I dont see why multiplayer is a must? 20 years from now nobody is going to be playing R:TW online, but people will still be playing the single player.

Multiplayer should remain as it is, a side option for people who want to play it, not the main focus of the game. When a game's main focus is on multiplayer there's no real point in buying it, all you can do it play it online until everyone stops playing it and then it just gathers dust.
...

Not to crack on you Thrud, but I see that you joined the org just this year. How many times did you play MTW as a multiplayer, did you ever play STW as a multiplayer? The reason I ask is that your comment appears to come from someone who has never played multi more than a few times.

I bought STW for the SP. Loved it. But after a time the AI just got tired and repettative. I was never an MP guy, but tried it out on a whim. It blew me away, it was amazing. It was like play Uber-chess. The challenge was unbelievable. Then I started playing team games and the strategy kicked up another notch.

I can't even play SP anymore. The AI is horrible. I win anything close to an even battle in SP. The only way the computer can hope to win is to have either overwhelming numbers and/or units that have super morale/armor/weapon upgrades -- i.e. not fair fights. In short, it is just boring.

I'd never have continued playing STW/MI/MTW for the last 4 years if it was just an SP game -- the challenge of playing "uber-chess" versus creative and surprising human opponants is what has given the game longevity.

As testament, this is the only "chat board" for a game I have ever visited, and not coincentally it is the only game I play as MP. Beacuse of MP there is a community -- I've spent many hours playing with and against the peeps that are here.


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Bachus is correct, poor MP numbers and lack of emphasis on MP are self-fullfiling prophecies -- if there is no committment or belief that MP can build and become a vital aspect to game sales & series longevity, then it never will be. But, yes there is $ risk involved in putting in the time. I do think though, that if that earlier suggestion (I think by Tomi?) for aggressive MP support with all those fantastic ideas for tourneys, etc would build up the MP numbers. If that was done from the start of STW and servers were always merged and tweaks/fixes/improvements were carried over from each version of TW to the next, I'm certain that the MP#'s would have steadily increased for each release. 2%, 4%, 6% perhaps more? I also think it is an exponential/critical mass type thing -- the more peeps that do it the bigger and faster it grows. But all this pre-supposes a committment to try to build the business that way.

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I fell off my chair laughing with Yuuk's Elmo slam --- Elm that was too damn funny and came out of nowhere. Elm, you're not the only one who has perfected their rout technique -- I thought my run style was quite accomplished. Some day I will go to the derby (I got a friend that goes yearly) and will share a jug with you Elm.

[CBR]

Thrudvang is correct when he says "20 years from now nobody is going to be playing R:TW online" Its more likely 20 months and for some of us 20 minutes


CBR

[Voigtkampf]

Well, as for my 2 cents…

I’ve been playing Rome online for the last two weeks, but I found time to play only 6-7 games. All in all, the experience wasn’t as horrible as one might think, but it isn’t great either. I’ll play more matches before I go to make statements on balance issues of the armies et cetera, but as of now, the “can’t join host” for some peculiar reason, poor info on the games, inability to toggle off the full games (why in the world would I won’t to see dozens and dozens of games that are full and where I can’t join!?!), the rampant and fervent fashion in which new games are being pushed into the list so I can never focus on one title, since its gone from my sight in half a second…

I will keep playing Rome MP - not very surprisingly, I have grown tired a bit from the SP, it’s not the tenth times as interesting as the Medieval or Shogun have been - and I will keep hoping that the further patches will improve the things somewhat. Judging by the speed the 1.1 has appeared, I believe that the CA knows that they must act fast if they don’t want to lose a lot of community members, perhaps for good. I chose hope.