FPS MCO
June 2nd, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Halo 3 is a first-person-shooter massively-casual-online game? Why is it a MCO and not an MMO or an MMORPG? Because of this comment in the article – ‘fits right along with their entire “30 seconds of fun†over and over and over, don’t you think?’.
30 seconds of fun sounds more like a casual game than a full on role playing game. It’s clear that an increasing number of people are getting uncomfortable around that rpg tag and want to move online, virtual worlds towards more attractive, less niche concepts.
The speculation comes from this article about the possibility that Halo 3 is an FPS MMOG. Of most interest is this great little quote about why Bungie would create a virtual world for Halo:
I love that phrase, the ‘virtual couch’. For a long time Counter Strike and Quake were the online real online games that mattered, but they didn’t utlise the idea of persistent worlds, both games enjoyed huge popularity simply because playing against human beings is much, much more fun than playing against computer AI. However, multiplayer FPS games suffer from being quite specialised – you’ve got to want to kill people to shoot them, you’ve got to want to shoot guns to enjoy them. They’re pretty hardcore games that appeal mostly to young adult males.
Clearly, there’s no ‘virtual coach’ in multiplayer FPS games. Consoles games, with their inability to recreate the FPS experience without the mouse and keyboard controllers, are in a position to develope virtual worlds of their own. The ‘virtual coach’ is a great idea simply because that’s where most people play console games. PCs are tied to desks and chairs, single seat experiences. Consoles are generally housed in the front room of a house and played by people sitting on a coach. Consoles encourage multiplayer gaming, especially offline, since they come with controller ports for more than one player. Be it split screen Mario Kart or old-school all-on-the-same page beat-em-ups like Double Dragon, that’s where they’ve excelled. Taking this party based play into virtual worlds would be an excellent decision.
For all the ideas I have about creating Massively Casual Online games, MCOs, the most compelling argument is that a small group of people could have fun together for around 20 minutes, disconnect and regroup at a later time. The persistent world doesn’t take them too seriously, the game doesn’t take them too seriously and the players don’t take the game too seriously. It’s all about fun.