A Broken System Part 3: Multiplayer Game Reviews
Part 3 of my video series taking on issues in our gaming industry, this time looking at multiplayer games and the complications that arise when reviewing them.
Watch the video for the full piece.
Full Script
Multiplayer games have always existed, in fact some of the first video games in history were multiplayer. In the beginning games really just had to be fun and entertaining. It was the gameplay that was purely responsible for the success of a game. Games started to shift and focus on story and providing an experience when gaming went through a bit of a renaissance in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Most games focused on the singleplayer experience and multiplayer was seen as a bit of extra frosting on a cake. Reviewers generally focused on the cake itself since while the frosting could make a good cake great, it can’t make a poor cake good. Of course there were multiplayer focused or only games like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike but they were fairly rare. In the same way most singleplayer games weren’t expected to have a good multiplayer, those games weren’t expected to have a great singleplayer. However the early 2000s saw a shift.
It started slowly with games like Halo showing that first person shooters could be done well on the consoles complete with a solid multiplayer component. Then we started seeing games trying to force multiplayer modes into everything. It almost became like not having a multiplayer component was a detriment. The frosting became part of the cake. This new multiplayer centric culture presents another issue for reviewers, one that affects how they do their reviews and also affects the consumers. This time we’re only going to look at the reviewers and the consumers since the publishers are following trends, not that they are innocent in the problem, but there’s little impact on them.
First the reviewers. The reviewers face several issues that impact their review. First is the fact that the line between multiplayer centric games and singleplayer has blurred over the years. The dynamic has really shifted in favor of the multiplayer game. It leads to the question, when is it ok to forgive a game with a poor singleplayer component and a good multiplayer component as well vice versa. It’s a hard line to find really at this point. You have games like Call Of Duty and Halo that started as singleplayer games that have basically become multiplayer centric games. You also have games like Mortal Kombat that have been expanding their singleplayer components with varying degrees of success. Scoring is the hardest part, do you really mark a game like Mortal Kombat or Unreal Tournament down for having a weak singleplayer component if the multiplayer is strong enough? Do you take points off Call Of Duty for having a weak multiplayer if the singleplayer is there? It’s a tough choice which will ripple through the whole industry.
Once you accept the shift to a multiplayer centric industry another difficulty presents itself. The quality and success of a multiplayer game or component of a game depends a great deal on servers and features working the way they should. The problem is that how the servers and features work depends greatly on the number of people actually playing. Playing on servers with a low load is completely different from playing when the servers are stressed such as during the launch of a popular game. It was an issue that plagued reviews of Halo:The Master Chief Collection. The problem for reviewers is that they can review the game prior to launch based on what they experience which may be very different from what a player experience or they can wait and withhold the review until after launch leaving potential buyers in the dark. This is thankfully an issue that affects print more than online sources. Online sources like Gametrailers for instance, will often publish the review but withhold a score until after the launch. Print publications aren’t so lucky since they can’t really do that. Either way it still presents a major problem that can end up screwing over the consumer.
Which brings us to the consumer. Especially with the aforementioned shift many consumers are focused on multiplayer, it can make or break a decision to actually buy the game and even more so when it comes to preorders. A consumer may have preordered a game, especially one like Halo, strictly for the multiplayer. Positive reviews before release will only lead to worse disappointment if at launch the game servers fail to keep up with the load or if features like matchmaking fail. Even if the reviews withhold a score it still is hard for people preordering to decide especially since many store won’t allow refunds on preorders if special items are involved which they increasingly are. At the end of the day there’s very little the consumer can actually do, other than not preorder and wait.
It’s unfortunate but the publishers should be making sure that their servers can hold the weight and they don’t. It’s forgivable for a smaller game or a game from a smaller developer but not a game like Halo which is the most recent game to fall victim to this issue. Of course there have been plenty others before and surely more to come. It’s just that it hardly affects the publisher, they still have your preorder money and the money from purchases at launch, regardless of the state of the actual game. They’re unlikely to invest in making sure they work flawlessly at launch.
So what’s the fix for this problem? Really it’s the developers and publishers making sure the servers can handle the load, especially with popular games. However seeing as how this is unlikely to ever happen, As of now the best option is what sites like Gametrailers have been doing and not giving a score until after the launch to be sure that they score accordingly. The real issue here is the culture of preorders which is what leads directly to this issue but that’s something for another day.
There was an article recently that showed that EA makes more money from the extra content than the base edition:
http://n4g.com/news/1813329...
So it behooves them to keep servers active and running smoothly for games that have DLC.
Another problem with reviewers is they should not play a Black Ops 3 campaign
on default mode . For someone like me, which i played around a hundred FPS campaigns ,default mode is easy for most FPS campaigns that came out in the last 8 years . I am pretty sure the person who reviewed Black Ops 3 for IGN, has a lot of experience playing FPS games, but played the campaign on default mode even though the game will suggest to play on higher difficult mode if you have a lot of experience playing FPS games . I guess to IGN clicks and views are more important than a proper review .