Now, our readers can put their torches and pitchforks down, I am not here to rag on multiplayer, nor am I here to spew vitriol in the form of personal opinions… That much. I will instead try to explain to people who enjoy the multiplayer in video games immensely why some others don’t. You might have noticed by now that I don’t really mention the multiplayer when reviewing a game, and there’s actually good reasons for that. I understand that for some people, buying a game is all about getting racial slurs yelled at you because you killed someone repeatedly. And that’s completely fine, I can respect that. It’s why we play games, right? Because it’s fun to ruin people’s day, even if it’s done through a medium like that. These days it’s customary for any FPS to come with a competitive shooting segment. Games like Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2, two vastly different games spawned from the same concept – “Killing stuff is great fun” – both embrace this, with TF2 being nothing but that online segment of your average shooter. The reason for this is probably that they aren’t as much traditional video games anymore as they are the online version of traditional games like football, basketball or Soggy Biscuit. There are people who love this and embrace it, buying each new version and competing against each other for the golden trophy that never comes.
This does, however, lead to some problems for new players, or “noobs”. Everyone was shitty at everything at some point in time. For example, a few years back, my friend talked me into buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the PC. Now, if you’ve never played a game with me, and most of you probably haven’t or the thought of me seriously trying to play a shooting game against other people would have you laughing uncontrollably, let it be known that I suck. I get bored and frustrated easily and my reflexes and aiming skills are generally awful. I did, however, find an exploit by reading online guides that allowed me to run around at incredible speeds, one-hit-killing everything in sight with a combat knife. This didn’t really seem to have any advantages over, say, using a gun to shoot people from thirty feet away. It did, however, make up for my bad aiming skills and lack of reflexes by not forcing me to actually try and hit anything, as I could just stab in people’s general direction and have them die instantly if I was close enough.
About this far.
Apparently, this made a lot of people very upset. “Noob!” they cried at me. At that point, I had logged in about 20 hours of online gameplay while playing with my friend, so I didn’t think I was that new of a player. But apparently, making up for my inabilities in other areas so that I could actually kill some people made me a bad player, even though others could do the exact same thing if they wanted to. Thus, my competitive online experience consisted mostly of people calling me mean things and generally being shit at it anyways. Here’s the thing: Multiplayer games are really hard to get into. Usually, people you compete with online will have at least some general sense of direction in the maps and an idea of who to aim their cock extensions at. There’s really no easing into it, no tutorial levels where you play against other people who suck at the game. And that, I think, is a major turn-off point for multiplayer segments. Yes, some people are patient enough to spend a few days learning how to play it right, but I am not one of them. It’s also the reason why most real reviewers (That is, people who aren’t just dicks that no one gives a shit about like myself) don’t tend to look much at the multiplayer: Because if you want to truly enjoy it, you have to invest a certain amount of time so you can catch up to other people, and reviewers usually just don’t have that time.
And once you get into the meat of it, multiplayer just doesn’t offer that much variation. I mentioned the comparison to real sports before, and I think it’s a very apt one. All games of football will be a bunch of sweaty, muscular men fighting over a ball so they can push it all the way to the end. There’s never any real changes. Giant, fire-breathing dragons don’t suddenly burst out of the ground so the players have to set aside their differences and fight the beast because the game must go on. Singleplayer games can offer that because all the levels and everything happening in them is pre-designed, and you’re basically just acting through an elaborate set painstakingly created by the designer. Multiplayer games don’t really change. Sure, there’s various objectives like “Kill everyone”, “Kill everyone wearing green jerseys” or “Kill everyone in order to get the magical MacGuffin, then kill everyone on the way back so you can place the MacGuffin in your room and feel very proud of yourself”. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with liking this sort of thing, but some of us don’t really have much of a competitive drive and would rather just play through an nice singleplayer campaign, rather than having our balls cut off repeatedly by other people we’ve never met.
I’m just saying that you don’t need to pay 60 $ for that.
Another problem that many multiplayer games seem to embrace vigorously is the one where you unlock content by playing for more time. In games like Team Fortress 2, you can still play a basic version of the class even without unlocking anything and have roughly the same chance as everyone else, since pretty much all unlocks are just variations of the standard weapons with little changes to suit different playing styles. That’s the good version of this, even though it’s still annoying that you have to play in order to get the full experience, but at least you don’t feel like you’re an quadruple amputee fighting people who are holding a rocket launcher in each arm. Other games like, say, Killing Floor makes it so that the longer you have played, the better you are. There’s no ambiguity here – play more, you level up and your weapons do more damage. That is the absolute worst way to do it, since Killing Floor isn’t even competitive, but relies fully on cooperation, and you’ll just never be as useful to the team as that guy who has everything unlocked no matter what you do. This is the absolute worst way to go about it. Call of Duty: Modern Dinnerware 2 fell somewhere in-between. A lot of functions were locked until you unlocked them through playing the game for a while. I understand that this is a way of keeping people playing and avoiding it all going stale, but it seems rather lazy and alienating to new players. What’s the fun in playing your spanking new game if you can’t even have all the coolest toys until you’ve played for long enough to get bored to death of it?
There was one other element to the multiplayer experience in Fall of QTE: More Than Software 2, which were co-op missions. These missions felt like an extension of the singleplayer campaign, albeit without a real story: Short little stages that were, like the main game, populated with NPCs and had clear, defined and varied goals along with being made just so people could enjoy playing through them, rather than try to be the best. This is the type of co-op game I like, as opposed to Borderlands, the aforementioned Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, Nazi Zombies and so on where the objective is always the same, or at least extremely similar. Some of these missions were stealth missions, some were vehicle sections, some were pie-baking contest, etcetera. My attention span isn’t really long enough to get really “good” at games, so the variation in these missions made them feel distinct enough from each other that I enjoyed them. Most multiplayer games just don’t have that sort of appeal and are only really fun for a few hours, which is not long enough to really get anywhere.
“Fear my 5 hours of playtime! Pew pew!”
So to sum it up: The main reasons why some people – and I don’t know how many I am speaking for here, but let’s just pretend it’s a whole lot! – don’t enjoy multiplayer that much is a steep difficulty curve, other people being dicks and the need to invest a large amount of time into it in order to get the full experience, which is also tied to the difficulty. Some people enjoy these things immensely, others get bored of it before they stop being “noobs” and finding another game to play. It really is a matter of opinion, as some people will insult Call of Duty for being the same game released over and over while others will defend it to the death. I think that both of these sides need to step back and examine Call of Duty, not as a game, but as a sort of online sport for people that can’t play regular sports or simply don’t want to. If you stop expecting Call of Duty and other series like it to change, instead accepting that it’s meant to be samey realistic wartime shooters with a new edition released each year, and that changes would ruin the whole point, which is to get really good at it by playing a series of games with roughly the same rules year after year, then chances are that one won’t feel the need to judge it so harshly. Personally, I find this kind of repetitive stuff exceptionally boring, but a lot of people don’t, and if they wanna do the same thing over and over until they’re really good at it, that’s fine with me, but I just don’t give a shit.
