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A Tale of Three Games: How support and multiplayer UI can make or break multiplayer communities
The topic of this post is one near and dear to my heart. It deals with three fairly recent RTS games: Red Alert 3, Dawn of War 2, and SC2. It talks about the different approaches taken to their multiplayer browsers and community support, and the differing fates of their competitive scenes. Red Alert 3: While unjustly maligned by some, I believe RA3 to be an excellent game. Although it had been nearly two years since I played it, I can still clearly recall specific multiplayer games of spectacular intensity. RA3 had many triumphs to trumpet: a seamless incorporation of naval combat, an excellent in game UI , a diverse and fun cast of units, and an excellent division of micro and macro. To elaborate on the last two points, every unit in RA3 had an ability. No unit was an ordinary, boring point and click, and no unit was a frustrating caster with 4 or 5 different spells. Also, while expanding was vital in RA3, the use of a single resource and a single worker per expansion meant that you did not have to mindlessly build up workers for the entire game. The net effect at upper levels of play was an incredibly dynamic, fun, and well paced game with constant skirmishing and few dull moments. Yes, there were bugs and balance issues, but these could have been ironed out. Yet they were not. The support for RA3 has been dismal. Game breaking exploits are rife and are not fixed. Imbalanced strategies are found and never patched. And this is not even the most frustrating part of the RA3 online experience. No, that would be the frustrating and incomplete Gamespy multiplayer browser that abrogates any merit the game might have had. Let's just list a few of its failings: 1. You have to leave the game and go to another website to initially sign up for multiplayer. 2. Custom games list is populated based on the random chat channel you are placed into at login. 3. A near total lack of useful chat commands and features. 4. Automated matchmaking has few options and is quite bad. Basically, I would describe the situation as this: RA3 is a delicious Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuit. Gamespy is a thin layer of shit covering it. No matter how good that biscuit is, it's fucking ruined by that tiny amount of shit. It's a damn shame too. It's as if EA went to all the trouble of dressing in nice suit for a job interview, but then decided to wear socks and sandals. And without even matching socks. Basically, it made the game a chore to play, and is the primary reason I and many other gave up RA3 early despite its promise. It is entirely unacceptable that RA3's multiplayer browser did not even reach feature parity with RA2's! The fundamental message here is that you CANNOT and MUST NOT market out your multiplayer browser to a third party! It is the means by which your game's players will interact with the game every day. Many players will spend as much or more time in it as they will playing the game itself! It is absolutely vital that the integration be well thought out and seamless. Dawn of War 2: Dawn of War 2 is near and dear to my heart. I was one of the best DoW2 players in the world, and have literally hundreds of hours spent playing this game and its expansions. It gave me much joy, but even I admit that it is in many ways a disappointment and a failure. This is what multiplayer DoW2 could have been: A game taking the innovative gameplay, sheer scope, and cinematic spectacle of Company of Heroes and transplanting it from WWII to the more diverse and faster paced setting of WH40k. There is literally no setting in existence more suited to huge scale cinematic combat than WH40k, which is why having the multiplayer be focused on small squad based micro battles was a travesty. Yet I still loved the game for what it was and played it faithfully for years. Still, even for what it was DoW2 had too many flaws that it took too long to address (or were never addressed at all), which has caused its slow death. First, the in game UI is rather clunky. The space bar does nothing, for instance. Tooltips are vague and misleading, and mechanics are complicated and hidden. The game is filled with odd bugs and idiosyncrasies, such as certain buffs stacking in odd ways to give unintuitive results. Many of these problems have been known since release, and have, in fact, been addressed numerous times by third party modders. Yet Relic, the makers of the game, fail time and again to do the simple data entry it would take to fix them for the wider game. Also, the game's support for custom maps and mods is just plain awful. Both must be downloaded and installed manually, and mods must be activated through command line tags on a shortcut to the .exe. In short: the average player will never use one. This blunder is especially despicable since Relic itself proved the game's capacity for fun mods with the addition of The Last Stand game mode. A better integration of custom mods and maps could have lent the game much life. But the third and most damaging error is the same as that made in RA3: Relic farmed out one of the most important parts of their game, the multiplayer interface, to a third party. In the beginning, this was Games for Windows Live. GFWL dealt a crippling blow to in-game fun and community. For instance, if you wanted to message someone to play, you had to go into a separate, stark white GFWL interface and essentially send them a pseudoemail. Even when it worked, it was slow and aggravating. It also meant that Relic couldn't patch their own game without coordinating with Microsoft. It drove off droves of players for years before Relic finally had had enough. With the advent of the Retribution expansion, Relic switched over to Steamworks. This was a marked improvement from GFWL, yet it still remains clunky, buggy, and frustrating because it is an ungracious attempt to marry two entirely different systems. You can't, for instance, invite someone in game to your game without first adding them as a friend through the steam friends UI. Thus every attempt at arranging a match is circuitous and frustrating. Furthermore, when Steam servers go down for maintenance (frequently), every single person's current game is ended and they cannot make a new one. This makes no sense at all since the games are played P2P, and the only reason Steam servers are ever needed are for matchmaking and score reporting... Today the DoW2 multiplayer scene is largely dead and almost entirely unsupported except for the occasional cash grab cosmetic DLC. A sad state of affairs for a game that might have combined the illustrious legacies of both the DoW and CoH series. Starcraft 2: Starcraft 2, also, was a disappointment to me. I found the decision to split the campaign into separate expansions by race appalling, and overall found the game to be far, far too similar to Brood War. That is, I wanted something revolutionary, what I got was basically Brood War with a modern UI and unit AI. In fact, from certain design standpoints I thought the game was a step backward. Various nuanced and interesting units were replaced with far more boring and straightforward ones (reavers vs collosi). A number of interesting unit interactions were wiped out with no real replacements, and the focus on the macro game was taken to a ridiculous extreme. And yet SC2 is a great success, and I these days I find myself playing it almost exclusively. In fact, I would say that for those craving competitive RTS, SC2 is really the only game in town. Why? Because Blizzard has supported its game excellently. When exploits are found, they are hotfixed immediately. When people complained about shortcomings in the functionality of the ingame chat interface and custom games interface, Blizzard obliged with a revamp. Blizzard's observer, casting, and replay tools are absolutely unmatched. Their community interaction both online and through live events is similarly unparalleled. In short, even if I find the overall game design concept to be a rather dull rehash, SC2 is polished to a gleam. RA3 and DoW2, on the other hand, had a few strong innovations drowned in a glut of minor shortcomings. In the end, when I want to cut down a tree I will take a honed and sturdy axe over a rusted and ungassed chainsaw. tl;dr RA3 and DoW2 had a number of innovations and great ideas, and could have been genuinely great with better support and a decent multiplayer UI. Lacking both, both failed to maintain strong multiplayer communities. SC2, on the other hand, has grown and continues to grow prodigiously despite containing few gameplay innovations because of strong and sustained developer support. more