Multiplayer gaming is still tedious

Even in ideal scenarios, multiplayer can be a real pain

Published on August 31, 2003 By Draginol In PC Gaming

We played Rise of Nations this evening here on the LAN. Even with ideal conditions, multiplayer strategy games are almost more effort than they're worth. I think age is a major factor here. When I was in my 20s, I burned thousands of hours mucking around trying to get Total Annihilation or Warcraft 2 or C&C or whatever games going.

But now at 32, I seem to have a lot less time or at least patience to throw away 20%+ of the "game day" due to various problems in multiplayer. Whether that be a given game crashing in a team game or it losing sync (and this is on a LAN) or mismatched teams or some other glitch or general game issue. It's not Rise of Nations' fault, this could be Warcraft III or Age of Mythology or whatever, it would have been the same thing.

I think first person shooters work out well for multiplayer because you can join games in progress. So not everyone is dependent on one person. But in strategy games, it only takes one person to ruin it (accidentally due to a crash or whatever) or through maliiciousness (not a problem when you're playing with friends but definitely a problem when you're playing on-line).

Comments

Ahab

on Aug 31, 2003

I can see where you are coming from there. I'm not sure if it is just to do with getting older ( though that's a possibility) but maybe the "shine" has worn off multiplayer for you? Similarly I find it harder to get a satisfying game online nowadays, it is often just not worth the effort and troubles unless its a carefully pre-arranged match. Of course it doesn't help with the ever-growing numbers of cheats and trouble makers that delight in ruining others people's games for their own ends.

VeXeN

on Aug 31, 2003

It's funny you say that, I wonder if that's the reason I keep coming back to CS or UT to get my online craving. I will say this though Command and Conquer Generals is by far the best way to get a RTS game going online. You just enter quick match and boom your in a game. Now with all the patches out the game hardly ever loses connection. I played 8 games this weekend and not one game crashed or didn't work. Battle.net is really good as well but the cheese in that game is way to much, for me anyway. The fact is RON is really bad with online play, compared to the other big RTS games out there. I think the main reason is because they use 2 lobby's and not one like other games.

BTW AOM is much better for getting a game going then RON, It work most of the time, it just seems there network code is much tighter. The problem is IMHO AoM is just not as good as RoN when it comes to gameplay.

Matt

on Aug 31, 2003

Alexg is right. I fyou are looking for easy jump-in-and-play RTS, pick up C&C Generals. It's really quite simple to learn.

I would say, for what it's worth, that Rise of Nations has to be the -most- complex of the bunch, so you're really making it hard on yourself there...

Draginol

on Sep 01, 2003

The complexity of the game isn't the issue. It's the multiplayer aspect of it. Where something crashes, or a player quits, or someone gets knocked out. The game complexity itself is irrelevant.

Solitair

on Sep 10, 2003

What you really need in an online strategy game is player assisted AI's. Whether a player intervenes or not will have no effect on the other players. Players could then jump into 'empty' AI roles during a game so no waiting would ensure.

Imagine a server which started an AI only game every few minutes and players could peruse games and join at any stage, or just join a the start. The AI decides what it wants to do each turn and the players just tell the AI what changes to make. They can focus on any aspect of the game (military, diplomancy, research) or micro manage to their hearts content. The other players (whether AI or human) would never suffer from lag or dropped connections.

This approach would work well for RTS (in some ways it's already present) or turn based strategy.

Paul.

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