Okay. So Fallout 3 was just released and it’s clear that Single Player Gaming isn’t dead. I sort of thought it was because, I’m obsessed with World of Warcraft and every time I play an SPG I can’t help but feel like I’m wasting time, just by giving it my attention. I could be rep’ing up, pvp’ing, chatting, wasting time (maybe that’s what the SPG is for), lvling Blacksmithing, lvling Mining, working the auction house, working on Achievements, grinding items. The online environment provides a seemingly endless opportunity to users to succeed and have fun working on their character or by starting another character and working on them. The same thing happened to me last time I purchased Bioshock. It had this cool RPG aspect to it, but at the same time, It could easily have involved real people and made the experience that more enjoyable and enduring. World of Warcraft has definitely changed the way I look at games and the market, now that I’ve experience greatness. I’m less willing to go back to an anti-social video game where there’s no human interaction.
In the history of multiplayer games there are a few games that standout in my lifetime. Double Dragon allowed two people to kick ass. Contra’s upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbabaselectstart helped me enjoy a NES game by allowing me to beat it. No way Jose did I ever beat Double Dragon or Toads or Mario, The only NES game I ever beat was Contra. (I still suck at Mario games to this day. I kickass at Zelda though for some reason). Next up is Counter-Strike. I remember playing CS 7.6 in the late 90s I ordered 128kbps internet just to give myself a chance at another game I sucked at. Mind you I was playing from Tokyo, Japan, busily Alt-tabbing between word files and CS. I had a pretty sick setup in Japan. I had my own study with a couch, sliding glass window, computer desk, and work desk. It was pretty neat. I haven’t been able to live without a computer since then. My PC of choice was an IBM because my pops worked for IBM. It was that S10 or something a tall Black Computer with a Monitor on stilts that had a separate CD-Rom and disk drive below it that popped up and down. It was a pretty sweet set up. I still have it at home in Connecticut. It sux though, there’s only like one PCI slot on the motherboard. But it helped me game it back in the day for sure. I bought some Japanese games for it too, but never quite figured any of them out. My fav maps were train, prodigy, office, and a few more I can’t remember. CS was so great, because it gave the user such a diverse arsenal. It was no longer free for all there were teams. And each team had a purpose outside of trying to kill each other. Team Fortress achieved this originally too to some degree, but the silliness and fast pace made it too much like every other frag fest on the market.
No multiplayer collection is complete without Goldeneye. My whole dorm used to get involved in games freshman year at University of Richmond. Robins Hall had two incredible n64 matchups: Goldeneye and MarioKart. Some British chappy was ridik at the SPG and unlocked the Egyptian level for us. But honestly that level was too big. My favorite gun was the grenade launcher. The green lvl with the two stories and opening and closing doors is excellent. I’m sure I could still have a blast playing Golden Gun on it today, hunting down my opponents. Or License to Kill with grenade launchers. Too funny! People used to get so pissed off, cause you’d die if you walked into the burning embers of the grenade.
Battle.net is the reason we have WoW today. With the success of Diablo and D2 and the Warcraft 2 and 3 serieses, and other Strategy classics like C&C, Dark Reign, Blizzard was able to bring us WoW: the real-time 3d version of their Lore. I remember seeing fotos way back in the 90s of Warcraft Online footage. When it finally came out in 2004. I didn’t even care. I enjoyed Halo, Tiger Woods golf, I was still playing a lot of SPGs because I hadn’t experienced anything really great. The multiplayer games I was familiar with were team games, but were teams of people bitching at each other, they were rarely friendly, and rarely my age group. I only enjoyed the game when all my local friends were on, otherwise it was just “you n@%#a, you fat whore, you fucking stupid nose picker, you’re gay.” Looking back, XBOX Live was pretty pathetic.
The PVP idea in Halo’s online experience is novel. WoW needs to borrow it. You only play against people of your online lvl. it doesn’t matter that you’ve beat the game and unlocked all the cool stuff. You start out online as a lvl 1 and work your way up based on kills, life, accomplishments, etc. Casual gamers who are good at Halo usually stay at around 14-25, and the obsessed usually get up to the 30-55 range. I like this idea, because in WoW’s battlegrounds, you’ve got lvl 19s with ridik enchants and the best gear in the game for that lvl crafted or well-farmed. I’d much rather play against equally geared people as myself because then you could tell who had real skill. Otherwise you just get zergd by a lvl 19 with 4000hp when most lvl 19s only have 1500 hp. So I’m constantly finding myself playing at a huge disadvantage to people at my lvl. That would never happen in Halo. A 55 would never play a lvl 1 even if the lvl 1 and 55 had both beaten the SPG, because the PVP aspect is much more difficult and skill based and not based on how many times you kill the same stupid animal with no special attacks or heals or armor. I could kill a million spiders, raptors, bears, and still never have a hint at how to PVP. That’s essentially what happens. You play against people that are way better than you and you don’t even have a chance to learn. I want WoW to implement a lvling system inside of PVP that allows for a dual PVP spec and when you’re back in the regular world you come back to your PVE spec. This is how I think WoW could benefit from a lvling system inside of the PVP aspect of the game. Specific gear inside of PVP, all players start at lvl 1 and max out to 80? But you can only use PVP items in the BG. Maybe that’s too extreme, but Blizzard is pretty extreme in their control over individuals rights in their games so it wouldn’t be cruel or unusual, I just feel it would help abate these farmers who ruin the game for the rest of us.
The title of this post is the future of gaming. My question to you is What is the future of gaming. I keep seeing more and more games coming out and they don’t seem special or necessary. They’re becoming like films in the movie industry. Some directors are always going to churn out excellent stuff and we can Rely on Blizzard for that even if we have to wait a while. Other companies are going to keep churning out bargain bin games. I don’t understand why though, because the potential upside to a great game right now seems huge. There’s not enough new games on the market, everything's a reiteration of something else. Smackdown 4, Fallout 3, WotLK, Call of Duty 5. Personally what I’m most interested in is the development of a spanless online environment that crosses all online platforms and accepts each and everyone of them in an Online world. Read Tad Williams: Otherland for an example. That my friends is the future of gaming, life, and the world to come, amen.
-AM321CAN
p.s. well it would be really cool anyway.
