Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I discussed Bloody Good Time having some interesting ideas but ultimately being a bit rough around the edges? Then I pined for more interesting competitive multiplayer design in general? I guess I didn't have to wait long. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is the cure to exactly what was ailing me.

I'd heard about the multiplayer in AC:B and while I wanted to remain optimistic, there wasn't a exactly heap of evidence for a positive outlook. Ubisoft Montréal hit their multiplayer high water mark (design-wise, anyway) with Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. The two vs. two asymmetric multiplayer was brilliant, featuring a pair of stealthy, gadget-carrying spies facing off against well-armed mercenaries. The spies were tasked with theft/sabotage and the mercenaries had to thwart them. While the spy gameplay build upon the single player campaign's mechanics, the mercenaries were a completely unique playstyle. In fact, Ubi Montréal went so far as to implement first-person controls just for the mercenaries, while the spies remained in third person.

It was a great design and created some truly fantastic moments. It was expanded upon a bit in the next Splinter Cell game, Chaos Theory, but the introduction of a strict deathmatch mode was as much as drawback as the other additions were improvements. Some do prefer Chaos Theory, and that's fair. But either way, it's no far cry (alright, pun intended) from its predecessor. And from here, Ubi Montréal cooled off on pushing the multiplayer design envelope any further. Rainbow Six: Vegas and its sequel were certainly very polished and tight, but largely a refinement on a relatively well-known formula. The multiplayer in Splinter Cell: Double Agent was largely acknowledged as inferior to prior entries. Splinter Cell: Conviction had a compelling co-op mode, but its multiplayer was also quite lackluster. I don't even remember if the first Far Cry had multiplayer and while the second did, it was absolutely forgettable.

It's a bit surprising, but very pleasantly so, that Ubi Montréal has seemingly created a multiplayer game as interesting as Pandora Tomorrow with Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. In a lot of ways, AC:B is similar to The Ship/Bloody Good Time- each player is assigned one other player as a target and must hunt them down. Where it differs significantly is the environments are filled with NPCs, all of which are identical to the dozen or so multiplayer characters available. The challenge is to determine which of these characters is actually your human target and take them out. It's actually quite similar to Chris Hecker's Spy Party in this respect. A good player in AC: B will hide amongst identical NPCs, doing their best to impersonate an AI, waiting for their moment to strike. Penalties are doled out for killing NPCs, so guessing at your target is a risky proposition at best. And more points are awarded for a stealth kill than one delivered after a large, obvious foot chase.

If you do manage to spot your pursuer before they can get their knife into you, a chase sequence begins. Similar in form the chases in AC's single player gameplay, if you can evade and hide from your pursuer for long enough, their contract on you is nullified. And the leading players in the match get multiple contracts on them, only magnifying the tension and their paranoia.

The only bit that's disappointing is an XP/level system that grants new abilities, as is all the rage these days. I don't like this becoming a mandatory multiplayer feature, and I think the gameplay would be more interesting if players always had the same abilities. But it's a relatively minor quibble and it's entirely possible I'm wrong about its long term value.

Ultimately, the gameplay is about lying to other players with your behaviour. So far, it's fantastic. Unlike Bloody Good Time, where being sure of your target meant comparing the crosshair's name label with the one on your HUD, in AC: B only obvious behavioural tells will distinguish player from AI. This and the focus on melee kills makes all the difference. It's the gameplay I desperately wanted Bloody Good Time to be. There are still plenty of interesting ideas in BGT that aren't present here, of course. But the core loop I wanted it to have has been made manifest in AC: B.

I've only put in an hour or so thus far, but I'm really enjoy it. Little can get me to brave the cesspool of Xbox Live these days, but AC: B certainly has. And fortunately, voice chat is only allowed during the brief lobby loading session. A great mercy that, as even in just that small window, earlier tonight I heard what sounded like a dog chewing on someone's mic, interspersed with (doubtlessly) racist/sexist/homophobic slurs.

It's entirely possible the luster will wear off, but thus far, this is exactly the kind of multiplayer experience I was looking for. It rewards patience, subtlety and planning, not twitch reflexes. Deceiving pursuers into killing an identical NPC a few steps away makes you feel damn clever. The risk/reward of taking even the smallest of actions makes the game feel quite tense. I'm really looking forward to putting some more hours into this.

And if you're not a frothing angry Internetman, I'd be more than happy to play with you. I'm Nelsormensch, and I look forward to stabbing you in the back.

Bloody Good (Pun)

"Sometimes we get stuck on success/failure when those are the least useful criteria for judgment."

Michael said that on Twitter over the weekend about Fable 3, but for whatever reason, I've never really connected with that series. I certainly get what people think is interesting about it. I just was never able to get into the series. But that does mean I've been spared the pangs of broken Molyneux promises.

But what Michael said equally applies to another recent game, Outerlight's Bloody Good Time. The spiritual sequel to Outerlight's previous project, The Ship, originally a Half-Life mod that grew into a full Source release. And BGT bears a lot of similarities to The Ship. It's a purely multiplayer FPS where rather than being a free-for-all or team vs. team, you're assigned one specific other player as a target. Similarly, another player (but not your target) is assigned to hunt you.

There's a whole raft of weapons and they offer different points each round. One round, a kill with the remote rat bomb might be worth only two points, but when it's "hot" the next round, each kill is worth five. Additionally, there are environmental traps that always offer the most amount of points possible.

The catch is, you're not actually allowed to kill any of the other players. You'll be penalized if any of the guards or security cameras see you even carrying a weapon. So you have to find out of the way areas (or use the traps) to dispatch your prey. It certainly doesn't have the stealth dynamics of, say, Hitman but still means you have to be more deliberate and calculating than just wasting your target as soon as they come into view. But from what I remember, The Ship actually did a better job of creating the "safe areas" where you'd be mostly safe, but also unable to act on your own.

And that, unfortunately, sums up a lot of Bloody Good Time. The Ship was still rough in patches and there are definitely ways its dynamics could have been refined, which is really what I had hoped BGT would do. But it seems in the attempt to simplify for BGT, some of the design problems with The Ship have been exposed even more. Guns are the least interesting weapons in these games and encourage rote FPS behaviours that really don't capitalize on the game's strengths, but they seem even more prominent in BGT. I think Outerlight would have been better served losing the guns completely and creating more bizarre weapons that really emphasize the cat-and-mouse gameplay where BGT really shines.

The Ship also featured NPCs thatlooked similar to the players, meaning you had to be very sure the character you were aiming at was truly your target. They're gone in BGT which seems like a good refinement, except it's possible for players to choose identical characters that differ only in name. This means you still have the same challenge of ensuring you've got the right target, except both of the actors you're looking at could be looking to kill you, unlike the NPCs in The Ship that weren't threatening. This means you're usually best served taking the kill even if you aren't sure and just suffering the penalty if you're wrong, again undermining the playstyle where the game works best.

To be fair, there are improvements in BGT. Both games feature Sims-like needs (e.g. hunger, sleep) that must be periodically dealt with, lest they start to impair your character. The Ship had eight of these, which was way too many. BGT reduces this to three. This still provides the tense decision to either take a chance now when it's seemingly safe or holding out a little bit longer, possibly to be disabled at the worst moment without being overwhelming.

It's pretty clear to me this wasn't the game Outerlight wanted to release. There's a rather melancholy interview with Outerlight co-fonder Chris Peck saying the company has more or less been dissolved. Reading between the lines, it's easy to infer they didn't get along well with Ubisoft. One can't help but wonder if some of the shortcomings in BGT were compromises to make it "more appealing" but really just diminished the game as a whole.

It's sorta tragic that might be Outerlight's last entry, since Bloody Good Time is practically soaked with good ideas that just needed a bit more time in the oven. Although that they "spent two years and 600,000 pounds on pitch materials and demos chasing publishing deals" is a bit worrying too.

Mainly it's disappointing that there isn't more experimentation with multiplayer FPS design. Aside from all the crazy things Valve is doing with Team Fortress 2, the most significant advances in mainstream multiplayer FPSs is adding RPG-light leveling and a positive feedback loop for kills. And that's not a slight to Bungie/IW/et al. They're taking existing conventions and polishing them to a mirror's sheer. That's fine, but advances are increasingly fractional. I want more weird stuff like Bloody Good Time. I'm looking forward to Brink and what it looks to be trying to do with fluid movement, but I wish that wasn't the most (and seemingly only) ambitious project on the horizon.

But with all that being said, Bloody Good Time is only $5 on both Steam and XBLA. Even a bit unrefined, there's no question all their crazy ideas are worth that. Just make sure you're playing with six people at the most. Any more than that and it gets too frantic and doesn't serve the game that well.

And I made it through this whole post without making a nautical or "bloody good" pun. Gotta say, I'm proud of my restraint.