More Death From Above

The first multiplayer trailer for Modern Warfare 2 just dropped like a payload from an AC-130. In the same way Infinity Ward started showing off Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer, they have chosen not to do a reveal trailer or a trailer that captures a broad swathe of gameplay. Instead they have chosen to show one mechanic of the game, which is an interesting way of showing people the experience.

This is not a video aimed at the same crowd as the single player reveal but rather it exists to stoke the excitement of people who like to tweak the hell out of their perk selection. Way back in 2007 the first glimpse of the multiplayer game we saw was of what looked like mad haxx0rz. One dude shot another dude THROUGH A WALL. This showed off the game’s bullet penetration and Deep Impact perk and was especially amazing as no game had done bullet penetration to that extent. In an RPG you might choose to buff your Intellect. In Call of Duty you choose to buff your ability to make bullets go through walls into other players.

The new Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer trailer shows off unlockable kill streak rewards. Call of Duty features a ‘the rich get richer’ mechanic where the better the player does, the more rewards they get. In COD 4 after 3 kills the player would get a UAV which would show the positions of every enemy player on the radar. After 5 kills the player gets to call in and target an airstrike and after 7 kills, an AI controlled helicopter gunship circles the map and targets enemy players with a devastating barrage of fire. In Modern Warfare 2 you get to pilot a Spooky gunship.

This system has caused some consternation amongst some players and designers. To be straight up, in the case of Call of Duty I don’t have a problem with the kill streak rewards because I’m not that bad at COD and will semi regularly unlock the kill streak rewards. It is an interesting problem though. Multiplayer shooters have a notoriously high barrier to entry because as soon as a player has played a map they have a large advantage against a new player for the obvious reasons. Newer players are weak and vulnerable in a system like COD’s where those players that have played more of the game are not only better in skill but unlock skills and weapons that allow them to more effectively gun enemies down and unlock circling death machines.

The same system occurs in single player games. Devil May Cry punishes players that struggle with the game by giving them fewer unlocks. Good players will gain more in game currency to buy better abilities and upgrades which will then ease them through the rest of the game. Worse players will gain less currency and thus be able to buy fewer upgrades and will have a tougher time getting through the game.

Some designers take the view that the player should be working hard to become better at the game. Ex Ninja Gaiden designer Tomonobu Itagaki deems that only a select few players should be able to enjoy his games fully as Ninja Gaiden takes a lot of hard work to understand and play. That is a fine view to take as long as you can accept the consequences of lower sales, a niche audience and critical reviews. FHM famously scored the original Xbox Ninja Gaiden 1/5. This is a perfect example of a review catering to the magazine’s readership because most readers of FHM simply won’t be able to grasp and enjoy Ninja Gaiden (I’m not being a snob here, I have never got past the second level of a Ninja Gaiden game) as it is not their play style.

Imagine you are new to Call of Duty and you try the multiplayer. You enter the game, emerge from your spawn point and a sniper drops you through a wall. You respawn, stick low in cover and work your way through a building. An enemy player strafes into the corridor and you both open fire. Despite both having assault rifles, he kills you first as he has unlocked a rifle with a higher rate of fire and has a perk which causes each bullet to do more damage. This gives him enough for an air strike. As you respawn the world explodes around you as the air strike rains down. This gives him the extra two kills he needs for the chopper. As you respawn again you see the names of your team scroll up on the killed list as the gunship hoses them. You creep down an alley and as you emerge, the chopper appears from over head and kills you again. You take the disk from the tray and trade it in. This is not a worse case scenario, this is can happen with worrying regularity.

Maybe you are thinking that this is just something you need to suck up and with time you will be the one calling in air strikes. This is true and after some persistence the rewards come thick and fast but you will potentially lose a large percentage of your player base after their first game. I am something of an advocate of levelling up systems that reward players with cool shit as I am capable of braving the meat grinder of online shooters to get to the sweet candy centre filled with red dot sights and gun ships. But what of the players entering the world of multiplayer for the first time and are being thrown to the heavily armed wolves with only a burst fire M16?

Videogame designers are almost all universally bad at tutorials and I struggle to think of any recent high profile game with a good tutorial.

Note: I use the word tutorial to describe a sequence of events where the game explicitly describes its mechanics to you. I am not counting the games that just drop you in and tell you to go.

Single player portions of games have yet to find an elegant way of explaining the mechanics of a shooter that uses every button on the pad in multiple ways and multiplayer shooters have yet to really start exploring tutorials. A notable entry into multiplayer tutorials is Team Fortress 2 with the intro movies it plays for each map. However these are often ignored and skipped past. Shadowrun had training missions against bots but just thinking about those actually pains me.

Call of Duty more than any online shooter needs a tutorial as it is deep and complex and draws in players who are experiencing online shooters for the very first time. Who knows, perhaps Modern Warfare 2 has a tutorial system but in the absence of any information, let's consider some potential solutions.

The following all use Call of Duty as an example and presume you have some knowledge of the mechanics present in the game.

Until the player ranks up to level 3:

1. A simple voice over description of the mode plays during a load screen. A non threatening voice is important so don't make it sound like Marcus Fenix.
2. Enemies are drawn with a Ghost Recon style diamond around them. Players can get used to the sillouhette of an enemy and recognise the shape of an enemy in prone and also behind cover.
3. All bullets have exaggerated tracer rounds to show exactly where the bullets are landing.
4. The radar could display all players at all times.
5. The game uses an under the hood system to determine if the player is exposed or in cover and displays either a warning message or a supportive message when this happens.
6. The grenades have a trail attached to them or a marker is displayed in the world to help predict where they will land.
7. Good firing points are indicated in the world.
8. Perks are displayed by colourising an enemy when the player is in combat with them to show if they are using Juggernaut etc.
9. Some kind of dialogue is shown when the player dies to explain what caused their death in simple language.
10. Surfaces are colourised and maybe labelled to show their resilience to bullet penetration.
11. A warning indicator shows that they are in the scope of a sniper.
12. A proximity warning indicates that claymores are near (not their exact lcoation though).
13. The game detects whenever someone calls you a "fag" and mutes them, filing automatic bad rep.

There are a hundred ways we can ease the transition into multiplayer without achingly boring tutorials. All can be optional and they could even fade away as the player becomes accustomed to them. Many of the above would never work in a single player context as they would smash any kind of fiction you are trying to build but a multiplayer environment allows us to not worry about whether we are colourising walls or drawing boxes round characters for the first few matches.

Due to this being the internet and knowing how people often misinterpret what someone writes, I want to be clear that I am not crapping on Call of Duty. Call of Duty is just a good game to talk about as it is at the fore front of modern shooters and its influence can be felt more and more.

Thanks to Sustainability on the Infinity Ward forums who I stole these images from. His analysis of the trailer is something to behold.