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Over the past few years, the MMO’s market has established itself as a very lucrative one, with World of Warcraft leading the way. World of Warcraft is a role playing game (RPG) and RPGs work well online, with the gameplay suiting a large, always-on persistent world. Recently however more developers have started looking at bringing other genres to the MMO space, but we’ll be focusing on RTSs in this article.
Tom Clancy’s End War springs to mind. The multiplayer mode had a persistent online war between the 3 major factions, and as players won matches, their factions claimed more territory, until one faction had claimed all the territory. After that the map reset and the game started all over again.
Earlier this year Command & Conquer 4 launched, taking an even more active step into the online arena, by requiring the player to be online permanently even for the single player game. As you levelled up in the single player campaign, you unlocked new units for the 3 available classes. This levelling carried over to the multiplayer component, and the game ultimately suffered because of this.
The problem comes down to balance.
Balance by its very nature is a fickle beast and it’s always hard to find the perfect mix (or even just a decent one) when designing an RTS. As other online games have proven, any perceived advantage in an element of the gameplay causes players to flock to it like flies to a turd. Starcraft is a prime example of this with the now infamous zergling rushes.
The balance issue is compounded by the fact that gamers can choose their faction, which leads to uneven matchups on servers when one faction has a perceived advantage. Imbalances between rival factions on a server can cause gameplay to suffer, and for RTSs where you will be fighting a persistent online war, a faction imbalance can be catastrophic.
The next big MMORTS set for release is End of Nations, being developed by Petroglyph Games and set for launch next year sometime. While Petroglyph has stated there will be a PvE (Player vs. Environment) element in the game, the majority of the game will be dictated by the PvP (Player vs. Player) component. This brings me back to my previous point; one perceived advantage on one side will cause people to flock to it, and being an MMO, a change to the PvP component will more often than not adversely affect the PvE side of the game.
In the current standard where the single player RTS component is completely separate from the multiplayer, balance is much easier to maintain, albeit still quite difficult. Within the confines of a single player game, it is much easier to compensate for imbalances. This is not the case in an MMO, in which any change has a knock on effect which can quickly get out of control.
Balance is easier to control in an online shooter, and even an RPG, but when developers already struggle with balance in most RTSs, the added complications of a consistent online world are likely to be overwhelming.
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