The joy of offline multiplayer

The joy of offline multiplayer

Fetch me my Saturn


I’m sat on a rare patch of grass in the tourist infested Cardiff Bay enjoying a pint of bitter, the scorching sun and listening to a friend rant over the current state of the games industry. A typical Saturday afternoon it seems.

“I just don’t get online multiplayer!”

With this said Ben sits back with a painfully familiar smug smile which suggests he’s made his point clear. This is where I would normally become defensive, or simply insult his mother, depending on the level of drink involved. Today is different though. For once I join him in the smug smile, as the opinion he has just angrily put forth is one which I completely relate to.

To explain further, we have been discussing the lack of offline multiplayer in a game widely considered to be one of the outstanding titles of 2009 on ps3, Uncharted 2. I suggest to him that the 3 player online co-op mode of Uncharted 2 is a pretty fun, if remarkably difficult jaunt. His reply is simple:

“It’s just not as fun as when you are all in the same room!”

I nod agreement. It is this shared opinion that gives us our problem for the evening. With Ben visiting for the weekend, what can we play when the vast majority of exceptional titles offer no kind of split-screen? We decide that we can play Little Big Planet and maybe some Fifa 10, but the rest of my meagre collection of ps3 games simply do not offer offline multiplayer, and these are big hitting titles like Dirt 2, Uncharted 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. No split screen between them.

We discuss the possibility of breaking out the Wii but we agree that we did the Wii to death when we lived together and neither of us really fancies swinging our arms around at the moment. Plus we guess that no-one will really play our preferred Wii multiplayer game, Mario Strikers Charged Football, online anymore. No competition.

Luckily, there is another option available to us. An option that for most people is little more than a memory long faded. In our search for great offline multiplayer I find myself hooking up the Sega Saturn in the living room and popping in a copy of Athlete Kings. If there is a better summer offline multiplayer game than this on the current generation of hardware, I have yet to find it. We carried on into the night all laughs, drinking Tanqueray and breaking world records that we had set last year. It was an unashamedly fantastic night that eventually came to an end at 4am Sunday morning after a slight detour into Die Hard Arcade.

The problem here is that although we had a fantastic night, we felt forced to skip back two generations of hardware and back to the mid-nineties to achieve it. There is certainly an argument to say that it is my currently smallish collection of ps3 games that caused the issue of what to play to begin with but at some point, it would seem to me, any adopter of this current generation would be faced with exactly the same problem when building up their collection of games. The problem is surely emphasised when it is taken into account the quality of the games involved. Uncharted 2, Dirt 2 and Bad Company 2 have all been lavished with praise, and rightly so, but they all lack something that was taken for granted just a few short years ago. Anyone who remembers working so hard to arrange multi-tap parties on the ps1/psx will remember how important gaming with others face to face was and is. The same can be said of anyone who can recall the astonishing moment that they first played 4 player Goldeneye on the N64.

This leads me onto my next point, and what is really my concern for the future, if major developers turn their back on offline multiplayer for major releases, what kind of gaming culture is this encouraging? I’m sure all gamers have experienced at least some kind of abuse from a faceless gamer via headset. I’m equally sure that we have all seen gamers spamming moves in fighting games, endlessly crashing into others in racing games and of course, camping in first person shooters. It can sometimes seem like an endless mix of desperation to win or desperation to be stupid at all costs. Both of which remove any real fun from the game.

During my formative years as a gamer, which were based heavily around the N64, when playing multiplayer games with friends every action had a reaction. There was a very real accountability created due to the fact that you were sat next to your opponents on a sofa. If someone endlessly spammed moves because they felt like winning, they would quickly receive a cushion to the face. They’d be told to not take the winning so seriously. Also, if someone endlessly ruined a good race for others, driving around a track backwards to take others out for example, a similar punishment would be dealt out. And we all did it of course, pushing our luck and winding each other up, but again, even this process was aided by being face to face as you could gauge the reaction of someone who was about to become the butt of the joke before you made it. Online there is no such system in place. It’s like fitting sarcasm into a text message; it just doesn’t ever come across.

So it seems that due to the lack of this face to face experience there is a danger of creating a generation of detached gamers, gamers who care more for achievements and trophies than for the actual joy of playing against human opponents rather than badly programmed bots. The irony of all this is that before games entered mainstream culture, they were considered a solitary past time, an extension of dungeons and dragons for spotty kids in dark rooms. Now that games are main stream the old stereotype may be truer than ever. By ignoring the importance of offline multiplayer, the industry is effectively encouraging gamers to play alone. MAG may sport 256 player online battles and team communication via headsets but ultimately players are still participating alone.

Having said all this, online multiplayer is truly fantastic. To be able to play multiplayer matches at any time of day is truly the future of gaming. It just seems bizarre to me that I can play co-op Uncharted 2 with Ben when he is 200 miles away but we cannot play when in the same room.