Is Halo 4's multiplayer aimed at the hardcore multiplayer gamer, or have you given thought to the more casual player who is really intimidated by competitive online play?
One of our core goals right from the beginning was called "Halo for everyone". We wanted to broaden the experience, but its always tricky to do when you have so many high expectations of a competitive game. So our first approach to this was Regicide. I remember back in Halo 3, there (was) a somewhat successful experience where for your first ten games or so, you'd start out in Boot Camp, and it was always a free-for-all, always on one map. As a result, you didn't have to worry about disappointing your teammates. You just got to go in and fire at the first thing that moved. It was a good entry point, although it had issues later on in the game where players were exploiting the game to get into that hopper so they could kill the newbies. But if you had six people who had never picked up a controller before, it was a good starting experience.
...
What I love about FFA is its both highly accessible for new players and very competitive for experienced players.
With Regicide, its a free-for-all game, but the player is King and gets a crown over his head. Everyone knows where he is on the map, and there's a big bonus for killing him. Originally we wanted it because that way, players who were in last place could catch up by making a couple of King kills. We found early on in playtests that most players who were three or four kills back, statistically speaking they had already lost. And we didn't think that fit with the new player experience. So with Regicide, if you're a new player and not in first place, you have some opportunities to catch up quickly. Also, in standard free-for-all, we used to find that experienced players would learn to get a sense of who the weaker players were, and would race to kill them off. But in Regicide, the player with the crown is worth so much more than anyone else, they are the entire focus. So it gives some of the less experienced players the chance to relax a bit.
...
We thought it would only be for new players, but the more we saw our experienced players playing it, the more we started to hear them talking about strategies. So we added tweaks like giving bonuses to the player who's managed to stay alive as King, so for example if you are King for 30 seconds we give you an Overshield. It's ended up being a really unpredictable game type, and I think games come down to the last two or three kills, and lots of big comeback victories.
What makes a good multiplayer game?
A lot of things going on there. I think at the deep core design level, I think a near-perfect-loop, for a game that you want people to be playing 5000 games or for ten years or whatever, that loop needs to be nearly flawless. And then, your goal is to fire that dopamine hit, and to make that happen you have to make successes as awesome as possible, and minimize defeats. So getting that player psychology is huge.
...
What is it about multiplayer that gets you fired up?
...
I have some rules about multiplayer design. One is that strong players should be able to easily dominate weak players. We try to mitigate this with good matchmaking, but nobody likes a drawn out game, especially when you know who's going to win. The most exciting games are the ones that go down to the last kill, or the last second. Those moments of triumph, stealing that final kill in the last second.
So those are the things that a single-player game can't give you. Those moments.
And I think you know you have a good multiplayer game when those moments start happening every single game. You can't just script that action. It can only emerge from gameplay between humans.
