PC Gamer - October 2011

STAYING AHEAD OF THE GAME(R)

TALKING
MAN
DEV

My biggest passion in gaming lies in multiplayer experiences. There is no greater joy than to know that gamers 1,000 miles away are screaming at their monitors because of what I just did to them. So when a new;first-person shooter;releases, I’m excited to unwrap my copy and jump straight into MP. Yet after logging about five hours of Team Death Match in a recent blockbuster, a strange thing started happening: before I knew it, the end-of-match screen popped up with the scoreboard, and even though my name was sitting at the top, I had no recollection of how long that match had lasted. I sat there, bored, and realized that there’d been zero memorable moments.

I put in a few more hours of game time,
but as I played I felt myself going through
the motions without any real emotion or
thought. I was mentally spacing out, fol-
lowing the same routes in a zombie-like
state. It’s like driving home from work and
reaching your destination without real-
izing how long you’d been driving. That
scenario is in no way a testament to your
driving skills, but more about how routine
that experience has become.;
can offer new challenges, but developers have been
creating new and unique game modes for years, yet
nothing has been able to topple the appeal of standard
Team Death Match. Do you log online to pick up a box,
to run from A to B, or to get headshots? For most
gamers it’s the latter, and TDM still best promotes the
core experience that makes FPS so much fun: killing
other players. The issue comes when you are several
hours in and the process of spawn, kill, die, and repeat
just isn’t cutting it. So how do we keep TDM from
becoming stale?

Climbing the mountain

We ran into this exact question while developing the Battle Commander mode for Homefront. Our early prototypes created dynamic missions that randomly asked players to capture zones or pick up boxes. But it wasn’t long before players ignored these side-objectives completely, and instead continued to simply kill each other.

Do you log online
to pick up a box, or
to get headshots?

Richard “Powertool” Carrillo is a senior game designer at THQ. His Facebook profile picture will be of him with Shannon Elizabeth at the Playboy Mansion until the day he dies.

Anti-zombification Challenging gamers and keeping their interest is becoming a harder and harder task for developers. This is especially true in the FPS genre, where most games have similar gameplay, modes, and features. Like me, players will establish the same rhythms until they start mentally tuning out. The industry’s solution to this issue has been more modes, more maps, and more weapons. Is the future of the FPS to pack hundreds of each into a shipped game, and then add more in DLC? New content may get the job done, but only for a limited time, and at a high cost. So how do we, as designers, develop experiences that continuously chal- lenge our players without tons of new content? How do we postpone gamer zombification? A new game mode
At that point we did the best thing we could: we let
them have the TDM experience they wanted and built
dynamic missions around it. We gave individual players
more power if they performed well, and others were
tasked to take them out. These new missions gave every
spawn extra purpose: either start your own progression
or knock an enemy off of his. Players could now esca-
late into the biggest threat, control the match, and be
hunted by every opposing player. In buzz–word terms,
we called this “dynamic escalation.”
While I don’t wish for every FPS to grow players into
mini-bosses, and I don’t think that our specific example
is the sole future of the genre, I do believe the future of
FPS is a mountain climb instead of the current roller
coaster. As players kill each other, the match’s intensity
should increase and offer new challenges. The enjoy-
ment should be in the escalation
instead of waiting for bursts of
excitement, and the experience
should be driven by the players
instead of riding a one-way track.
As developers, we need to chal-
lenge players each time their virtual
feet hit the field. To do this, we
need the players to drive the match.
These new challenges should be
player-controlled to offer dynamic
and unique experiences. We need
them to become the mechanic
instead of simply using one.
Because once players become
zombies, they’re lost forever. ■