Versus Multiplayer as a Genre

Multiplayer as a Genre

Multiplayer is a very wide genre because it can focus on a myriad of different gameplays.

What would be long discussion on the intricacies of multiplayer in Hearthstone would be completely meaningless for a multiplayer for Halo. However, they both share basic fundamentals. The challenge needs to feel good. 

If a player pulls a card out in Hearthstone on turn one and immediately gains such an advantage that the opposing player has no means of reclaiming board control, the card is—in itself—broken. Likewise, if there is a vehicle in Halo that is nearly impossible to stop yet can desecrate dozens of players throughout the gameplay, that’s a really fun mechanic! For one out of up to thirty people. You don’t want a 1:29 ratio of your players having a good time.

Counter-Play

Good examples of this can be found exactly there. The banshee in Halo originally was a very strong vehicle that had limited ways of being countered. Players could fruitlessly unload all of their ammo into the sky-high vehicle and only be rewarded with being bombed off the face of the map.

Over many different games, consistent changes were added to balance strong vehicles to strong weapons. Rockets gained lock-on, the Spartan Laser was added, snipers became lethal to vehicles, and the addition of plasma pistols disabling vehicles plus hijacking offered a much-needed counterattack. That offers a much more interesting give/take when deciding if you want to enter a vehicle. Banshees only fire forward, so is the player willing to try a bombing run when another player could easily disable their ship and steal it? Now the opposing team has a massive advantage due to the former being outplayed. 

Balance

A good multiplayer game knows these principles and keeps them in mind when developing every mechanic-- even down to how a map is positioned.

If one team spawns a fraction of an inch closer to a strong weapon than the other, statistics will show in time that that team consistently acquires it first. While that may not make or break the map itself, small mistakes like that will lead to very dismaying results in matchmaking. 

Likewise, with Hearthstone, if starting first gives the player such a massive advantage that the second player can never keep up, something needs to be done immediately. This is where balancing mechanics such as the coin in Hearthstone need to be very finely tuned to achieve optimal equality. It’s not about giving the players equal ways to play, but equal opportunities to succeed. 

Great Examples

It’s no stretch to assume, then, that I have respect for the Halo franchise’s ability to balance their matchmaking.

The advent of shields in a first-person shooter makes it that a player is rarely dead long before they knew they were under attack. This means the fights turn into a battle of skill rather than surprise, as the time it takes to kill your opponent is significantly longer than in other FPS’s. While many mechanics started out a bit broken, like the banshee example, the company has been improving with each new game to ensure no one strategy is the best. This is the mark of truly great multiplayer games.

Not So Great Examples

On the other hand, some examples within the Hearthstone gameplay appear to be very unbalanced. While the game does offer different ways to play—such as arena, battlegrounds, and story missions—the main gameplay of matchmaking is incredibly unforgiving. Every time a new batch of cards is released, the players capable of affording every new card immediately build decks that have been proven by professionals to be objectively the best. Players without will never climb the ladder. Worse yet, with every new ranked season that comes out, top-tier players are sent back to the bottom to once again crush all players without meta decks and rise back to the top. 

This can become incredibly discouraging to players who want to have a casual experience because even their unranked or wild modes are filled with players that have a significantly more powerful arsenal than the average player.

After a few months of a meta being discovered, all constructed modes become a fight between 3 different decks, despite the hundreds of card combinations that could be in play. But why would they be? They would get crushed against the meta decks.

This isn’t all bad news, however. Blizzard is very well aware of this issue, and each new season tries different ways to level the playing field. The first few attempts fell short, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying new methods, such as having significantly more levels for players to climb which would keep top-tiers away from bottom tiers, increasing rank generation at lower levels to push strong players out of the lower meta quickly, and more. While it may not be very balanced right now, it may just take one perfect tweak to get the system flawless. 

Overall

This is why I think multiplayer is never going to go away, as it offers players a much more diverse set of gameplay due to what it takes to play against other players using all of their skills against you instead of an AI that is pre-programmed to fight a specific way. There are strategies to be had when fighting against an AI, but they will never be as ever-changing as some good old fashioned PvP.

While balance issues will be ever prevalent in a world where a few dozen designers have to outsmart every possible combination of actions any player will ever take, I think playtesting and reiterating are at an all-time high due to the demand of multiplayer games. This spells a bright future for the multiplayer scene.