The Crossing - A New Way to FPS?

1up has a look at Arkane Studios' extremely ambitious new project. Called The Crossing, the FPS title looks to combine single and multi-player modes in a new way. From the article: "In the simplest sense, story missions are single-player shooting with an exception: Naturally intelligent human opponents take the place of A.I. There are two types of players: Elites and skirmishers. Elites are gamers playing the game in story mode. They're beefed up, heavily armored, and heavily armed. They have to be able to hold their own against a swarm of skirmish players. Skirmishers are gamers who typically play on multiplayer maps: well-trained, rank-and-file soldiers playing primarily to have some quick fun and increase their rank through defeating the occasional Elite. Skirmish players can also invade story maps and 'possess' A.I.s ala Agent Smith in The Matrix." So even if you're playing through the story, you'll still be challenged by the 'NPCs', all of whom will be played by a real-life human. Sounds like it could either be awesome or a total flop. Which side are you leaning on?

Comments

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really looking forward to being spawn-camped in single player.

Everquest tried it briefly

[nahdude812]

EQ tried this briefly on their test server maybe 5 years ago. On the character selection screen you were given a "Monster" option. It didn't work, and they took the option off there.

It's got several problems. None of them are insurmountable, but I would be surprised if any game company could successfully overcome all of them without several significant attempts.

1) Players will not fill the role they were designed for. Or more accurately they will deliberately choose to disengage from their intended role since that's tedious. You'll end up with all the monsters from a given level grouping up together for a single assault, or camping and taking pot shots. In EQ they had monsters from the level 10 area wander down to the level 1 area and grief the level 1's until someone bigger came along and wiped them out (only to start the cycle again 10 minutes later). You can design a game which prevents the monster from straying too far from their intended purpose, but then how fun is that?

2) Monster balance and player balance are very different things. Monsters are buffed in certain ways to make up for their lack of real AI. These same buffs are unbalanced when those abilities can be used intelligently. These different levels of buffing will make it challenging to make player controlled monsters balanced for all players. Also as a monster your intended role ultimately is to be defeated by the player. Why do you want to go into a situation you know is likely to defeat you as your primary purpose?

3) What do you do as a monster until the player arrives? Maybe you're switching around a lot between monsters so you are always near the player, but what if the player skips you (or you don't find the player)?

4) Especially in games that are approached as single player games, you really need to have a nice challenge gradient. It needs to be doable and the player needs to succeed more than they fail, but not have success be overly easy. Otherwise the player will get bored or frustrated.

5) If you successfully overcome all of these obstacles, how are you really any different from any other pvp game that has classes? Zomg my rogue can take out a priest before they even knew what hit them, or my hunter can two-shot a mage. What is the real distinction here other than one player vs many (and how do you make the many aspect interesting enough that it's not just a standard pve game all around, and how do you keep it from being so interesting that noone wants to be the single player?)

The only thing that's different about this from MMO PVP is that one side is the good guy (maybe) and the other side is evil (maybe).