IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Feature: Local Multiplayer Taking Backseat to Online?

Posted August 30, 2010 by Anthony Neal

On an anonymous college campus in Texas, it was a regular occurrence to walk into the common room of a particular freshman dorm and find sixteen college freshmen, four televisions, four Xboxes, and four copies of Halo: Combat Evolved on any given night. Yet, on one night in particular, when just such a set-up could probably have been found, you could also walk down one of the first floor hallways and stumble upon one measly freshman dorm room packed with fifteen college students, ranging from freshmen to seniors, all huddled around one Nintendo 64, four controllers, and one game. In fact, you probably know the very game I’m talking about.

GoldenEye 007.

Halo: Combat Evolved was sweeping college dorms nationwide; yet, here were just as many guys crowded around a small television set taking turns dueling it out with three other players on what many consider the first great console first-person shooter.

Did I mention that this was about six years after GoldenEye 007 had been released?

My roommate and I during our freshmen year got the word out among our friends that we were putting together a GoldenEye night and that all were invited. As mentioned above, we had fifteen guys show up, far more than we had chairs for. If you weren’t playing, you were probably sitting on the floor, watching others play. That didn’t affect anyone’s ability to enjoy themselves, though. Everyone loved that night, even just sitting and watching others play. This is indicative of one of the reasons I love games: the communal aspect. Fifteen people, brought together from different backgrounds, hometowns, and class years, by one great game.

Multiplayer has always been one of the things that I have loved about games. It’s never the “be-all, end-all” for me, but I would be lying if I said I never took it into account on certain titles. Local multiplayer has always been the kind of multiplayer that I love most. The chance to sit on the same couch with one, two, or three other friends and work your way through a campaign together or try to blast each other’s heads off has always provided great memories for me. GoldenEye and Halo: CE were two games that easily filled this category.

However, with the rise of console online connectivity, it seems that focus on this kind of local multiplayer has dwindled over the years. To be clear, many games continue to have local multiplayer… to a certain extent. For example, to cite some recently released disc-based retail titles, the last three installments of the Call of Duty series provide 4-player (4P) multiplayer, but only if you remain offline. ModNation Racers allows up to four local players offline, and two local players online. The first Gears of War title allows two players to go online together on the same console and Gears of War 2 allows for the same. Halo 3, however, allows up to four players to play together on the same console, both locally and online. In that vein, Halo 3 is one of the only games this generation that allows four players on the same console to play together online. That is competitive multiplayer online. There are other games such as LittleBigPlanet that allow four players to play together on the same system in a co-operative manner, as well as go online together (although LBP does have the occasional competitive level).

It is worth noting that Activision's upcoming GoldenEye 007 Wii exclusive, slated for this Holiday, will also feature four-player split-screen, but because it's limited to the Wii, we question just what kind of adoption it will see and whether the typical Wii audience will care about this functionality or the game itself.

Technical Limitations

While there may be a decent number of games that continue to allow up to four players locally, the number of retail titles that provide that functionality online is very small. Oftentimes, it’s a technical issue: “It is difficult to get multiplayer working in the first place, let alone changing all of your rendering systems to allow a second, third, or even fourth stream to draw at the same time,” said Justin Richmond, game director at Naughty Dog. “As games have gotten more complex, adding additional rendering time gets harder and harder.”

Scott Rudi, senior designer with Zipper Interactive, said, “[Some] developers choose not to do split-screen because you often have to reduce graphic quality to ensure that the game maintains a high frame rate. Rendering twice the information can be expensive, so the only way to maintain it is to reduce graphic quality, and many devs don’t want to show their game in anything but the best light.”

Sometimes, developers start out a project with the intent of incorporating split-screen multiplayer, but simply run out of time; such was the case with Uncharted 2. Richmond shared with IndustryGamers that split-screen was something that had “for sure” been considered for that title, but the team simply ran out of time to fully flesh out that feature. “We couldn’t do everything in the amount of time we had to work on the product. Delivering an AAA multiplayer experience was our highest priority, and as such, some things had to give.”

Other times, it’s ruled out simply because of the design decisions of the game the developer is creating. That's what happened with Rudi and the rest of Zipper Interactive as they worked on their latest title, MAG. Because of the nature of that game’s reliance on network connectivity, and the immense scale of it (MAG allows up to 256 unique players to play in a single match), rendering time and the traffic that multiple players on a single console would cause prohibited any type of split-screen incorporation. “If the two (or four, if you go quad-screen) players all stay in a tight group, you don’t have many issues. If the players start splitting up, you have to start streaming in more and more unique information for each player,” Rudi explained. “At some point where the players are out of sight of each other, you’re basically doubling (or quadrupling) the normal amount of net traffic your console is expecting to handle. MAG has great net code, but no one has net code that great. If MAG only allowed 16 players on a map, there’d be no problem, but then it wouldn’t be MAG.”

Extra Credit

Split-screen is sometimes looked at as icing on the cake, of sorts. “On many games I’ve worked on over the years, split-screen was always viewed as a ‘luxury feature,’ where it was only included if time allowed (pretty much never in my case),” Rudi shared. “In the past, I think there was real skepticism on whether split-screen actually sold more copies of the game, even if it was considered a fun feature for many players.” Having said that, however, Rudi voiced his certainty that localized multiplayer can impact the sales of a game. “[Providing] a social MP experience is a sure-fire way of selling your game.” Richmond noted that, “it has been proven that multiplayer itself greatly prolongs the life of a product.”

While both are certain that multiplayer can positively impact sales, as well as the lifetime of a game, Richmond and Rudi are also uncertain of any actual study that has ever been conducted on this topic. “I’m sure they’re out there, but I haven’t been privy to any so far,” Rudi said. Richmond, when asked about the issue of studies on how multiplayer affects sales, responded, “Does local multiplayer in addition to networked multiplayer bring additional value? Of course. Does it actually increase sales to players who never would have bought it otherwise? I don’t know. There is something intrinsically fun about sitting on a couch and playing a game together on the same system. I would like to think that local multiplayer sells units, but I have never seen figures one way or the other.”

The Future

So where does this leave this increasingly rare breed of multiplayer? If the types of multiplayer games that have been released over the last year or so are any indicator, probably not in a great place. The current generation of gamers is living in a world where online play is expected. It’s a generation that has grown up with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network (well, more Xbox Live than PlayStation Network, but you get the idea). Multiplayer isn’t just limited to how many friends you have, but how fast your connection is. Is this a bad thing? Far from it; years from now, the rise of Xbox Live will be seen as one of the greatest gaming developments of this past decade. For gamers such as myself, though, who remember what it’s like to sit yourself down on the couch with three of your friends and chase each other around non-descript hallways, it will be a little sad to see those types of games fall further into the past. On the other hand, it will make the few games that do carry that kind of local multiplayer support very enticing.

In the end, however, I will learn to cope. My friends and I will continue to carry our consoles and small TVs to each other’s houses to play and spend time with one another. If we have to trade the convenience of having games that allow for local online multiplayer with an ever-growing, interconnected gaming community that allows us to play with literally anyone in the world, I’m confident that we, and any others that also pine for more local multiplayer games, will survive.

After all, that’s not a bad trade-off whatsoever.

 

Writer’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, we attempted on multiple occasions to contact Bungie and MediaMolecule for this piece, but they’re both busy prepping a couple of little games for release within the next few months. We were unable to reach them as a result for comment on this article.

Anthony Neal has been a gamer since he was 5... back when he didn't know there was such a thing as good games and bad games. He loves movies, good barbeque, Mega Man, and is a proud, lifelong resident of Nashville, TN.