N'Gai Croal
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May 31, 2007 12:03 AM
Halo 3
Things finally heated up in
Round 2 of our Vs. Mode exchange with
MTV News videogame reporter
Stephen Totilo on the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. We taunted him by urging him to step out of the ivory tower and join us in the trenches where we were trying to grapple with the essence of Halo multiplayer; he in turn punched below the belt by exposing specifics of our online ineptitude. In today's final round, we get up from our corners and come out swinging against a common opponent--the starkly unforgiving learning curve that plagues many online multiplayer games--in an attempt to figure out how the rest of us can be trained to wage war like the veterans who dominate Halo 3's virtual arena. Some excerpts:
N'Gai Croal: My most provocative suggestion, however, would involve a change in how Microsoft doles out Achievement points on a per-title basis. For titles like Halo 3, where multiplayer is half or more of the reason people buy the game, developers should be encouraged to include a multiplayer campaign mode with as many Achievement points as single-player, effectively doubling the number of points available from that one game. This new multiplayer campaign mode would be an expansion of the training mode that you suggested, modeled after racing games like Burnout (maps and match types would be made available in tiers) and Gran Turismo (license tests for maps, weapons, equipment and match types) so that gamers are systematically trained for multiplayer--including team play and clan play--in much the same way that racing games teach us throughout single-player.
Stephen Totilo: You didn't mention it, but I think what you were trying to hint to them that they should look at good old Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, a game so ahead of its time that when they made a sequel years later, they had to number the new one as a prequel. It didn't just have competitive multiplayer. It also had co-op multiplayer, something crazy called counter-op (which looks like it will resurface in a game called The Crossing) and--get this--it had a multiplayer-map set of training missions called Challenges that lurked within the game's Combat Simulator. You played these challenges against--and sometimes with--computer-controlled bots. You could play them by yourself or with friends. The Challenges are what you and I are looking for in Halo, I think.
Click on the link below to read Final Round in its entirety.
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