I have played many FPS's in my life, and as such I've developed my own game philosophy. First of all, Multiplayer games are always the future of any game. This is very saddening, because MP just doesn't make up that kind of history and feeling that you are actually fulfilling a mission. A main problem with MP is that there is no order and control. It is, to put it simple, total anarchy. MP was ment to simulate Real Life, because every soldier behaves as humans because they ARE humans and not AI. But in fact, MP games are more unrealistic than SP games because of the anarchy: In real life, you just cannot do what you feel like. You have to obey orders. You have to shoot the ones your superior officers tells you to shoot. You have to obey rules of engagement. There are no rules in MP. There is no control. Except for a few clan-servers, which is hard to find when you just want a fast MP game. For this very reason I believe SP gives the player the best game experience. SP missions tells a story, and it gives you a rank. It gives you orders like in real life. And, just as in real life, the AI-soldiers, if they are not MP-bots, behave just like real life soldiers: Obeying commands from the superior officers. You just can't get that sense of military discipline in MP games. It is impossible, because there is no discipline at all. And if anybody ever use the microphone to try to communicate, they are not giving orders or tell you where the enemy is hiding. No, they are playing music or chatting, some scream and makes noise and behave childish, so you turn off your microphone so you cannot hear the ones who wants to say something more serious. However, SP games do have their drawbacks: They always put YOU in the rank of the hero who can save the world. The only game I've every played that gave me a feeling of actually being satisfied by my rank and the way I play the game, is Brothers in Arms. You play an officer, and YOU give commands to your fellow soldiers. You can stay behind the lines of fire, and watch your men doing their job, or you can do it yourself. Or you can finish the enemy off together. But it requires you to be the officer. Isn't there any game out there that places you as just a regular, drafted soldier? Telling a story about a 19 years young kid, being drafted in the army against his will, and placing him together with other conscripts? Yes there are: The Call of Duty series. But... again they want YOU to be the HERO who can save the fatherland or the motherland or the free world or whatever. You alone. Literally. They tell you, that you are not playing alone, but together with fellow soldiers, but you ALWAYS end up being the one who should finish the job off. The game cannot run its own curse without your help. In the missions, there are placed triggers in the game. Whenever the player goes through the trigger, the game is getting into a new phase. This means that YOU are the one who control the game, the game does not control you. Is that realistic? No. In the real world, the enemy or your allies, do not wait for you. If you are too late, well, thats just it. I am currently modding for Call of Duty 2, writing a World War 1 SP modification. My philosophy for its upcomming missions in the future is that it should place YOU as a regular, drafted soldier. Staring in muddy trenches. Watching your comrades getting pinned down by german machine guns and snipers. If you run in front of your comrades, trying to kill the enemy, you are more likely to get killed yourself. So you better stick together with your fellow comrades and let them actually help you killing the enemy. In some missions, you may not even survive. In fact, the very first missions I wrote for my mod Caught in The Wire (CITW) are programmed as to let you get pinned down by machine gun fire. You cannot win the mission. You are condemned. You may ask: "Why". I ask: "Why not"? What makes you think YOU should get special permission to live, while others are sentenced to death? I think any future FPS game should focus more about the actual gameplay and the game EXPERIENCES. For that you have movies, to just tell you the story, and the games are ment as movies you can interact with. But I think the games has gone too far: Not only can you interact with the game, you decide the curse. This is just going too far. It wasn't because of one or two soldiers that France, UK and USA won WW1/WW2. It was because of MILLIONS. If my modding ever gets beyond modding and into actual game programming, my games would be more like interactive environments rather than dynamic environments. Instead of making dynamic environments, you should make ONE huge environment with many DIFFERENT actions and events, so the player can choose which part of the environment to look at. It is not fulfilling the mission that makes a SP mission good. It is the game experience. It is seeing the environment, experiencing the life, and seeing your comrades getting shot. Then it simply doesn't matter whether or not you survive. The important thing is that you get a good experience from the game. A game should be exiting. Being an experience. Exhibition. Moments to remember and think about. Not competition.

Ok theory I guess. I do agree with your single player philosophy. In addition to being a hero, I wonder what makes players able to lug around an arsenal of weapons? It's a big drawback to a lot of really good games...

M.

If I wanted moments to remember and think about, I'd read a book. If I'm purchasing a FPS it's because I wish to compete with my fellow man. Akin to some friendly Paintball only without the bruising...

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Original post by dkteknoMultiplayer just doesn't make up that kind of history and feeling that you are actually fulfilling a mission.

That is not nessesarily true. I play a lot of team based games, mainly Battlefield 2 and Enemy Territory. In Enemy Territory, you must work as a team to complete missions. In Battlefield 2, you must talk to each otehr and make sure you have all of the nessessary points in control.

Multiplayer and Single Player are two different concepts. Multi-player is for competitive play or just to have fun with your friends. Strategies are going to be different, and much for involved because you are up against real people.

A single-player game on the other hand will give you a more immersing experience with a possibly involving story-line- however the strategies will basically always be the same because of how the AI behaves.

For that reason I think you're wrong in saying what mode offers a better experience. One player will prefer Multiplayer while one will prefer single-player.

You just can't get that sense of military discipline in MP games. It is impossible, because there is no discipline at all./quote]
Well for me, Military Discipline is not what makes a game fun or not.

A game rewards you on how you play. What rewards you get for what actions is what determines what people are most likely to do.

So, if a game does not reward you for Military Discipline, then you should not expect people to play with military like discipline.

The fact is that most FPS games reward individual skills, not necessarily team work. As they reward individual skills, one would expect play that tries to full fill the requirements of the rewards. And that is the type of play you see.

Take a look at another game: World of Warcraft (not FPS, but one that rewards team play). This is an essential concept in the game and so they designed for it. Most levels (raids) can only be completed if there is a team. The challenges are just too difficult for one character to solo them. So, this encourages team play and rewards it as you can only finish a level if you work as a team.

Guilds form and learn to work together, chains of command evolve and a discipline of sorts forms (in fact in most serious guilds you can be punished - kicked out of the guild - if you don't follow the rules of discipline laid down by the guild).

So, one must ask ones self: Do most FPS games actively encourage team work, or do they hope that the players will spontaneously create the social rules themselves that will create this team play.

Also, you must look at what the game rewards (and how it rewards). Most FPS games that I have played report the player's kill count (and lists them in kill count order with the highest first). This rewards players who make the most kills, not who supports their team the most.

Therefore someone who take a support role will not get as many kills and so will not have a high "Score" (but will help their team more). As their contribution to the team is not rated, they will not feel any reward for helping their team and so not play as part of that team.

In such games there is a very subtle reward for playing as a team. Teams usually do better in the long run. However, for you to get this reward you must play with a regular team. With a regular team you create social bonds that can then be used as a reward system, but this aspect is completely separate from the game its self.

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But it requires you to be the officer. Isn't there any game out there that places you as just a regular, drafted soldier? Telling a story about a 19 years young kid, being drafted in the army against his will, and placing him together with other conscripts?

What you are getting confused about here I call the fictional fallacy. This is the fact that any work of fiction (and a game is a work of fiction) focuses on a "Protagonist". The protagonist is important to the story.

Maybe during the storming the beaches at Normandy only 1 out of 100 troops (or whatever) made it onto the beach, but a work of fiction that just focused on one who got shot just as they left the boat would not be all that interesting. But instead the work of fiction focuses on the one(s) who provide the more interesting story.

Sure the player might play that one in a million, but it is the importance of that one in a million that separates that character out as worthy of being in a story.

In the Hobbit, there were hundreds (if not thousands) of archers shooting at Smaug, but the story focused on the one that killed him , because he was the one that killed him. If a different character had killed Smaug, then it would have been that character as the focus of the story.

Similarly with games. The player plays the protagonist, and that character is the protagonists, because that character is who the story is about.

If you want to rolepay, join or start a guild that roleplays. You'll lose to guys who play the game instead of telling a story with it, but if the immersion and sense of drama and imaginary adventure is what you're after, that shouldn't bother you.

Reminds me a bit of the Penny Arcade commentary on Starcraft:

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Gabriel and I played Starcraft, everyone played Starcraft, but for the most part he and I would play two Terran armies against Zerg computer opponents in an effort to simulate Starship Troopers. It might sound like you could only get a couple nights of entertainment out of this scenario, but you'd be underestimating our feelings toward Starships and the proud Troopers that wait within.

Co-op roleplay is what you want. The other guys on your team can take control and do the important stuff, and you can just follow orders and do your job without any real responsibility or specific sense of accomplishment.

Heck, play EvE online and join a BoB slave corp. You'll be a bitch and you'll have no real obligations or responsibilities beyond making your production or kill quotas, and you'll find no group of people more psychotically dedicated to a fictional world than them.

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In some missions, you may not even survive. In fact, the very first missions I wrote for my mod Caught in The Wire (CITW) are programmed as to let you get pinned down by machine gun fire. You cannot win the mission. You are condemned. You may ask: "Why". I ask: "Why not"? What makes you think YOU should get special permission to live, while others are sentenced to death?

Because you're playing the game, you're not going to want to play a game where you can't survive at all, that's just not fun.

<sarcasm>I, too, am infuriated when nearly every single adventure story focuses on the hero. Are authors just so freaking lucky that the character they choose as the central figure for their book winds up being some kind of chosen-by-the-gods champion of awesome? In The Odyssey, every sailor on Odysseus's ship gets killed... except Odysseus. Horseshit. Homer rigged that right from the beginning. He should have had to write it fifty times, starting over from the beginning every time his "main" character got offed by Charybdis or something, until he rolled up a profile that could make it through to the end.

Authors should have a big bag of twenty-sided dice, and use them to decide what happens in the story.</sarcasm>

I think your idea of realism's a bit skewed. Nobody wants to play a game that faithfully recreates the experience of being a soldier. It would be endless mini-games about PT and cleaning and shaving and then countless uneventful patrols where you try to stay awake and alert while you drive down the same familiar patch of road in your hot armor and your itchy helmet and then maybe on day #37 you get shot at and return fire and the enemy is two morans with one rifle and they surrender or run away, then on #63 you hear a strange noise but it turns out to be nothing, probably, and then on #84 you get yelled at for getting below 95% in the "shaving" minigame...

If you skip right to the gunfights, you're already messing with "realism" to get to the good parts. By putting your soldier in an intense firefight against trained gun-wielding enemies, you've already created an unlikely situation. You've done this because you want your players to enjoy the experience you're presenting, or to tell a story. By all means kill off your protagonist after every level, and have the next level feature a different member of the cast. Some Gamecube game did that, I think. Sanity something-or-other, where you played a half-dozen people throughout history and they mostly died.

But don't pretend that your action game is a "slice of life" documentary, and don't hold other such games to that standard.

I'd like to see a game where I'm only one of the heroes. Like in Call of Duty 2, I was the only one doing anything major. It would be interesting if it would take turns between me blowing up some objective, or some AI scripted guy doing it while I cover him or something.

M.