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Imagine you are playing Grand Theft Auto 4‘s bank heist mission (“Three Leaf Clover”) except this time your associates are controlled by real life friends. With the bags of vault money in your hands, you race to the getaway vehicle before you are swarmed by police, also controlled by online players. After remaining idle for a couple of seconds (“Get off the phone with your girlfriend, Matt!”), your driver starts up the car and speeds through the streets as The Clash’s “Police & Thieves” blasts from one virtual dashboard to all the passengers computer speakers. Inevitably, a trail of cop cars are on your back as you race to your team’s safe haven, a warehouse by the docks. After playing a game of cat-and-mouse with an increasing amount of police vehicles, a rooftop sniper makes an impossible shot to your front right tire which throws your Cadillac out of control, flipping several times over. Under a hail of gun fire, you run across a bridge to the other end. Thankfully, teams of your fellow crooks arrive and blockade the police with an endless amount of RPG missiles sending dozens of cop cars and AI controlled pedestrians flying. As you complete the mission, one of your back-up teams blasts Queen’s “We Are the Champions” from his car sending a signal to LastFM allowing all the remaining police to hear the track and feel the shame of having lost. This is the sort of experience Realtime World’s APB seeks to offer PC gamers this spring. It’s a reimagining of the single player experience through the filter of a decade focused on online competitive gaming and MMOs; it’s the sort of game I dreamed of playing a decade ago and finally get a decade later.
With the amount of bandwidth increasing in households and companies like Realtime Worlds building the infrastructure to allow emergent gameplay in the hands of countless human players gaming together, singleplayer games are finding a way to sidestep the uncanny valley of realistic AI and linearity of scripted events by letting other players take the roles that NPCs and AI-driven enemies once filled. Games that merge singleplayer mission structure and narrative with a multiplayer dynamic felt like a tangible reality in 2000, with Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption on desktops and the promise of Valve’s then soon to be released Team Fortress 2 (later released, in ’07, as a less ambitious, toon remake of the original). While Redemption‘s single player campaign was a recycling of Diablo‘s game design in 3D with a focus on narrative, the multiplayer experience let the host create his own campaign–controlling everything from spawning objects to transporting human players to a new environment, but, most importantly, letting the host jump into the body of any NPC. I never had the patience to sit down and create a campaign from scratch, so I would play game design jazz by spontaneously creating twists and jumping into NPCs I spawned in order to suspend the illusion of the world I created by having conversations with my players, unbeknownst to them that it’s me on the other end. No amount of dialog options in a Bioware game can ever bring back the excitement of those exchanges I had with human players. I wanted more and it has been quite a wait.
As in the APB example, having human players occupy the same world as you can also expand the possibilities of the minute-to-minute gameplay. Team Fortress 2‘s original plan was to allow a commander to have control of each player, giving one individual orders and taking on objectives in the way the commander saw fit. Battlefield 2 and the upcoming MAG also explore this concept in their multiplayer, but not to the same extent. The main benefit to this set up is that it can make the same old maps feel renewed by letting the objectives, strategy, and pacing be dictated by human commanders, but only TF2’s proposed version seemed to stick to the concept strong enough to punish players who would play against the given goals. What’s most exciting to me are the possibilities that will open up when games embrace both the narrative and gameplay benefits of multiple players in a guided experience.
My own personal dream game is a Mass Effect title that begins as a solo experience picked from a set of origin stories that will dictate your role in a larger adventure. After defining your character’s abilities and exploring his history through a predefined narrative, the game fits you with a crew of real-life players who all picked different origin stories than you. The game then guides the players through a narrative that continuously gives players options to help or backstab their teammates in ways that will reward them once the game opens up into its finale, a massive multiplayer war that finds your team pitted with and against various other factions. It’s a merging of single player structureed narrative and gameplay paired with a toolbox to let individual players change the course and tone of the story–each playthrough would be 40 hours, but an entirely different 40 hours. One playthrough can find you within a happy-go-lucky bunch of Firefly rejects while another could have you living out your own Event Horizon nightmare that finds one player backstabbing the entire crew for the promise of XP and rare equipment, but having to deal with his own trials and tribulations in time. With upcoming games like Brink and the down-but-not-out The Crossing, this ambitious framework for a game is only a couple more steps away.
I write all this as a gaming enthusiast who knows little about the logistics that compliment these sorts of projects. APB has been in the oven for seven years and, in case you haven’t seen footage, it’s not because of the graphics. Finding out how to keep players in-sync is the most difficult element to these proposed and struggling projects. Until a developer can make AI that can take over a human player’s role in their absence and study their play style well enough to make decisions in line with the moral choices they’ve made before, my proposed Mass Effect spin-off is a pipedream. That’s not to say that games like APB and Brink won’t give us plenty to chew on until a studio develops this sort of hybrid of single player narrative with multiplayer-minded gameplay–God of War 3 and Mass Effect 2 will soon feel like quaint, nostalgic single player experiences in the wake of the future ahead of us. Now that Twitter, LastFM, and Facebook have us all connected, it’s time we all get together for an epic game of cops and robbers. The only thing standing between you hearing “Police & Thieves” or “I Fought the Law” at the end of battle are a hundred players.
