Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
vsp, after you said you don't like multiplayer gaming I don't trust you at all and would not invite you over. Even if you needed a favor of some soldering for a car stereo purchase that I recommended.
(Actually, dave was the biggest multiplayer gamer of them all, so maybe this is not a good metric)
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Heh. I'm not ANTI-multiplayer; I'm sure I've bored you and others by pimping netrek before, which was an Internet game I was known to play in dave-esque proportions when I was in college (i.e. end the session, see the clock reading "6:00", and not know for sure whether it's AM or PM).
But I stand by my usual stance. A single-player game is as good as the designers make it; a multi-player game is as good as the players allow it to be. For me to really get into a multiplayer game, it'd have to meet a handful of criteria:
1) The game has to be sufficiently fun that even when I'm losing, I'm doing things that entertain me or are productive in a losing cause. That alone is a pretty big hurdle.
2) Pickup games with reasonably coherent opposition have to be plentiful. It only takes one too many BIFF!!1!11!s (or one cheater) to ruin an online experience.
3) There has to be a "clued" community where once I've spent enough time in pickups to play the game well and know how it _should_ be played, that I can join games with people who are equally serious about it.
4) There has to be a point to the game beyond simple socialization. I never got into noncombat MUDs or chat rooms for precisely that reason.
5) The game has to be one where you don't have to spend eight hours a day, seven days a week at it to either (a) acquire sufficient skill to hang with typical opponents or (b) build up enough rank/stats/levels/money/allies/etc. to do anything meaningful. (I'm looking at YOU, Evercrack.)
6) I will pay for this game no more than once. Monthly fee == sayonara.
Netrek _used to_ meet all of these criteria, but with the passage of time, #2 and #3 are harder and harder to meet. I go back to it once in a blue moon, but that's about it.
I may be getting old, but multiplayer FPS games have evolved far past my capabilities. I read people talking about stunts like shooting down incoming rockets, pinpoint railgun accuracy, super-speed jumping by blowing yourself sky-high with rockets, and I'm thinking "Holy shit, I'm still trying to draw a bead on somebody and they're doing that?" I feel like a beer-league softball player preparing to take on the Yankees, and I can't spend the time necessary to build up that skill level.
(On the flip side, I'll play single-player FPS'es. I grabbed Serious Sam recently and loved it.)
Ultima Online, Evercrack, Dark Age of Camelot et al. are all in the monthly-fee, sign-up-and-socialize, can't-advance-unless-you-spend-hours-waiting-for-monster-respawns-with-a-heavily-armed-guild-backing-you-up category. Next!
I've heard too many nightmares about player-killing and cheating and hacking in the Diablo family. Next! (Caveat: I like PSX Diablo, which does have co-op, and I actually found its interface to be more intuitive than the PC version.)
There is an online adapter for my PS2, but I haven't found a game that uses it yet that I'd be interested in.
Although I _am_ toying with the notion of <a href="http://cube.ign.com/articles/440/440372p1.html">this</a> little gem...