Right now most hardcore gamers decry social games as too casual. Where’s the skill? The twitch reflexes or deep strategy? The genre is written off as nothing more than a collection of software finely tuned to squeeze the maximum amount of money possible out of middle-aged moms. The term “Zynga trash” comes up often in enthusiast forums and comment sections.
While I personally don’t agree (I think a social game is a perfectly acceptable way to kill five minutes), it’s an opinion I understand. Some of my favorite video games feature extremely deep, chess-like strategy (Advance Wars), or extremely intense focus and motor skills (Super Monkey Ball 2). Neither of these elements are present in social games.
My question is simple: What if they were?
Below are three major ways AAA console games could be improved by incorporating ideas pioneered in the social games space.
Single Player with Benefits
Social games’ poor reputation among the hardcore set is fairly well-earned. Incessant cloning, overly-aggressive freemium pricing, and banal themes all-but ensured that the social category would remain the domain of soccer moms.
Leave ammo drops for your friends in especially tricky moments of Uncharted.
Perhaps the most damning complaint of all is that social games aren’t even really very social. Sure gamers can send each other gifts or visit each other’s farms, but the core gameplay experience is generally a solitary experience.
But maybe there’s something to that. Maybe there’s a way for your friends or for the millions of strangers playing a single-player game to actually have an influence on your adventure through the game. The game can remain a single-player experience, but it can unfold in a social context. Connected gaming can enhance single-player experiences.
Gamers could leave an ammo drop or weapon care package for their friends in a section of Uncharted 4 they had a hard time with. Items and messages could be left for friends in their GTA VI safe houses. The popularity of weapons or items purchased via in-game shops could impact their prices, helping to maintain game balance.
Some early examples:
Dark Souls: Players can leave notes to help (or hinder) the progress of other adventurers.
Animal Crossing: Multiple friends of family members inhabit the same town, and can work together as neighbors.
Massively Single Player
One of the coolest events Blizzard ever pulled off in World of Warcraft was the Ahn'Qiraj World Event in 2006. In the game, the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj were sealed by powerful magic, locking up a brand new raid dungeon. The doors would only open if thousands of horde and alliance players set aside their differences and worked together towards a common goal.
Players had to acquire what was at the time an almost unbelievably high number of war supplies. 400,000 Runecloth Bandages. 180,000 pieces of light leather. 90,000 Copper Bars. The list goes on.
Although WoW has always been a game focused around online multiplayer (it is an MMORPG after all), this was an especially cool event because it relied on the contributions of every individual. No mega-guild, no matter how powerful, could raise the required materials themselves. Even if your low-level character could only make a few bandages per day, every contribution mattered.
Worldwide progress could help take down Skyrim mega-dragons.
Now imagine if single-player games implemented worldwide goals and events that could affect the game world for everyone.
Elder Scrolls VI could introduce a massive, nigh-invincible dragon enemy. Only by players collectively crafting millions of high-level weapons would shops sell the equipment necessary to defeat it. Special post-game mission content could be unlocked in Call of Duty: Black Ops III only when players collectively killed 1 billion terrorists. A special 24-hour police crackdown event could happen in GTA VI every time 1 million police officers are ran over.
The games could remain single-player experiences, but the game worlds made more dynamic and alive thanks to millions of players working together towards common goals.
A few early examples:
Noby Noby Boy: Players stretch Noby Noby Boy. Once players collectively stretched enough miles to reach the moon, it was unlocked as a playable level. Mars, Saturn and Jupiter have also been reached.
Battlefield 1943: The Coral Sea multiplayer map was unlocked after the community collectively reached 43,000,000 kills.
On-the-Fly Data-Driven Design
Cliff Bleszinki made headlines recently for saying that he was tired of easy games and that Gears of War: Judgement would amp the difficulty back up. But in a Game Developers Conference talk several years ago, the Epic Games creative exec told the crowd of game-makers that you can’t make your easy mode easy enough. What if your easiest difficulty is still too challenging for someone? You then have a gamer, casual and ill-equipped as they may be, that is no longer having fun.
The reverse problem also crops up. Many longtime Bungie fans complained that Halo: Reach was simply too easy, even on Legendary, its most extreme difficulty level.
What is a game maker to do?
One potential solution is to take a page from the book of social game makers like Zynga and treat games, even single player ones, like a live service. By constantly monitoring gameplay data and by frequently deploying changes, game makers could let the gameplay data itself determine difficulty on the fly.
343 could use live player data to determine Halo's Legendary difficulty.
If Halo: Reach is too easy for you on Legendary, you could just tell the game you want the enemy health, speed, damage and other stats set to a level that only, say, 0.1% of other gamers survived. Likewise, live stats on low-skilled players could ensure the game was never made too hard for anyone that just wants a breezy experience. “Very Easy” difficulty could be set so that the bottom 5% of performers can get through it.
In the social game space this kind of data-driven design is usually used to find high-value players; to maximize revenue. But it could easily be used for gameplay good. Developers do their best to playtest their games, but things fall through the cracks. Weapon drops in the next Call of Duty could be upped on-the-fly if Treyarch noticed that players consistently ran out of ammo in the same spot. Nintendo could place a few extra Koopas in a late level if they noticed that it was a little too easy compared to previous stages.
One upcoming example:
Warface: This upcoming free-to-play MMO isn't just competitive. A rotating selection of cooperative missions are also planned, similar to "daily quests" in MMOs.
Progress Through Connected Play
Social games will probably never be popular among hardcore games, but they still have some good ideas that would genuinely improve some of today’s biggest AAA games.
The three ideas outlined above are just that – ideas. Maybe they’ve been tried before. Maybe there are good reasons they only work in casual farming sims and not AAA shooters.
We live in a connected world. It’s up to AAA game makers to figure out how to utilize the world’s social connections in smart and clever ways without compromising their vision. Even if you don’t play any of its games, Zynga has shown the world that you can take advantage of today’s always-on connections for much more than just another multiplayer mode.
Justin is Editor of IGN Wireless. He has been reviewing cell phone games since the dark days of Java flip phones. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
