Multiplayer gaming takes a step forward and John Gillooly lines the PC, Xbox Live and PS2 up against each other.
It has only been over the past year that the notion of serious online gaming has been anything other than a PC thing. Now we have two of the major consoles moving their multiplayer online via broadband and taking online gaming to the masses. The PC has always revolved around a handful of popular titles, so it is a perfect time to take a look at how online gaming works and whether the console newcomers have what it takes to break through to mass market popularity, and more importantly, what experience they offer.
Get ready for the killingA couple of years ago multiplayer was king when it came to PC game development. Heaven help any poor game developer who focused on, gasp, the single player experience. Even the crappiest of first person shooters usually had a list of multiplayer modes longer than Dr. Derek Smart PhD's enemies list.
Out of this intense focus came games like Quake 3: Arena and Unreal Tournament, both of which developed a strong multiplayer following, but dozens more were doomed to fail in their attempts to grab even a small dedicated following on the PC.
This should not have been surprising to anyone as the online PC gaming scene had always been somewhat of a monoculture. Shooter fans historically gravitated to Quake, either in vanilla deathmatch form or the team based Team Fortress mod; real time strategists got all hot and sweaty over Blizzard's Starcraft; role players flirted with Ultima Online then jumped into Everquest. Diversity in online gaming usually ended up being restricted to areas like Microsoft's gaming zone, or similar portals.
Over time titles changed but the trend has stayed the same. Starcraft is still the most widely played RTS; Everquest has had few serious challengers in the MMORPG arena and Quake Team Fortress was usurped by the Counter-Strike mod for Half-life as the game that simply swamped all other shooters in the race for online popularity.
ABOVE: The PlayStation2's network adaptor plugs into the back of the console and features an integrated IDE controller for the upcoming PS2 hard drive. Voice communication is an option and plays a big part of SOCOM through this Logitech headset.
The rise of Counter-Strike has been a revelation for online multiplayer gaming, but it is also symptomatic of the problems inherent in the traditional model used for the server/client based online gaming.
Games like Quake, Unreal Tournament and Half-life rely on ISPs setting up servers for gamers to connect to. The problem with it is that in order for an ISP to outlay the bandwidth and hardware costs required for such an effort, it has to ensure that it will actually get value for money, which translates to more customers. This has been an endemic problem with most online PC gaming for some time now (the MMORPG genre is the exception because publishers actually run the servers), and there is little end in sight.
It takes a monumental effort for a game to become entrenched in the online PC scene. Most people don't realise that even a game as ubiquitous as Counter-Strike started out with only one Aussie server location, QGL. As the beta versions of Counter-Strike progressed, more and more gamers started becoming aware of its existence and they then started playing, server numbers started to grow and the juggernaught began to roll. It was also helped by id software releasing the source code to Quakeworld, the program required for the online multiplayer team fortress mod to run on Quake. This brought with it a huge jump in cheating and a large chunk of team fortress players ended up migrating to Counter-Strike, which was then cheat free.
Counter-Strike is the most widely played example, but similar trends have been seen in most PC gaming genres. Since Counter-Strike established itself several other games have gotten a small foothold in the scene, but even the most popular titles like Unreal Tournament 2003, Tribes 2, Battlefield 1942 and mods like Desert Combat and Day Of Defeat have had nowhere near the number of players as Counter-Strike.
If we look at massively multiplayer online gaming, the potential for a monoculture is even worse. This type of gaming involves the dedication of serious hours to character development, and the nature of the persistent worlds seen mean that it is simply unfeasible for someone with any sort of life to play more than one of these titles concurrently. From a development point of view this can end up becoming a self-feedback loop. Because content can be added regularly developers can keep the experience fresh and new, which reduces the natural flow of gamers to other titles once they get bored.
This has meant that Everquest has risen to the top of the MMORPG pack and seems set to stay there for the foreseeable future.
Online consolationOnline gaming has always been seen as a PC centric activity. Sega was the first to look toward online gaming with the integration of a 56k modem into the Dreamcast console, but it had little success due to only a handful of titles actually including online features, the general crappiness of the TV for the supported web browsing and email functions, and the slow experience delivered by dial up modems.
Sega eventually released a broadband adapter, but apart from mid range success of Phantasy Star Online in Japan, the broadband adapter only became useful once people started hacking the console, and even then it was for uses other than gaming. One of the most intriguing uses of the Dreamcast was as a box that hackers could physically take into a location, hide in an out of the way place and hook into the network, leave and then use as a backdoor for external network access. By that stage the Dreamcast and adapter could be found on ebay for such a low cost that it was perfectly viable as such a disposable hacking tool.
However we now have two online console gaming platforms, using different models of online gaming, but both leveraging the increasing prevalence of broadband to make for a better gaming experience. The Xbox does this thanks to its inbuilt Ethernet adapter and Sony has recently released a network adapter for the PlayStation 2 to enable online play.
PS2 OnlineThe PlayStation 2 launched with the usual console multiplayer functions, with four player action available on some titles through the use of a multitap controller adaptor (A handful of games even supported IEEE1394 networks to hook multiple PS2s together) however it has now gone online thanks to a separate Ethernet adaptor that screws onto the back of the PS2.
There are two reasons that cynics will cite for Sony's release of this adaptor. The first is that it is a reaction to the ground up focus that the Xbox has on online gaming, the second is that it is a way of preparing for the next generation CELL architecture that is being developed for the PlayStation 3. At the simplest level, CELL can leverage other connected processors to expand the computing capability of the PlayStation 3 or in fact any other Consumer Electronics device that uses the CELL architecture. For this to work, it needs broadband, and it needs broadband done right.
Conspiracy theories aside, Sony's online gaming with the Playstation 2 is more in line with the PC than the Xbox. It uses a server/client approach without the closed network that Xbox Live has.
As an example, lets look at the current online flagship title for the PS2, SOCOM
Issue: 137 | June, 2012