#asymmetrical multiplayer

team fortress 2 payload race pits two teams against one another with both having the same end goal; they desire more or less the same result and are only "competing" to have done the best at that by the end. like they have a "canon" reason to fight but thats not important. this is also pvp i think we can all agree again - and if you disagree with my reasoning, we can instead turn to operation (1965), in which the end goal is unquestionably "to collectively remove all of the ailments from cavity sam" while still being unarguably pvp

in many competitions (i.e. archery, curling, etc) the end of the game is not determined by when a player gets a certain number of points, but by time or a certain number of attempts by each player or whatnot

as such, an experience where players are performing individual, separate tasks, which can make the game more difficult for the other players when performed successfully, and where all players have the same end goal, which is judged at the end of a certain length of time, is pvp, yes?

most asymmetrical multiplayer games offer up the idea that one party can hinder the other, while the other cannot respond in kind, while still being considered pvp; see "among us", among any number of other examples

now, consider The Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off; a competitor in this competition (or "pvp match") has no real agency in their own victory (on account of being a pumpkin), while still being a competitor (or "player") in the game.

if we agree that the above is true, then we must agree that a contest consisting of two players performing completely different tasks, in which one party may obstruct the other through their own success, both players having a shared victory condition of "most success within a set time period" (rather than "defeating" the other), even if there are competitors that don't necessarily have any agency in how well they perform, is a pvp game

I love stealth games. They are my absolute jam. I’ve been an Assassin’s Creed acolyte from the beginning and Splinter Cell rests firmly atop my list of favorite franchises. The industry isn’t flooded by this genre, but there are a fair number of quality contenders. The Dishonored games are a tour de force, I love the critically mixed Deus Ex prequels deeply, I only play Far Cry with my knife and bow, Ghost Recon is a kind of comfort food, even in Uncharted 4 I avoided combat in favor of being a sneak. In fact, really the only thing I like more than stealth gameplay is cooperative stealth gameplay (though I am a sucker for tactics games). There is just something about clearing a room with a friend, no enemy wise to your presence. Splinter Cell has brilliant co-op. Far Cry is at its best when your crew chooses the silent approach, one friend getting dirty up close with a blade while a ranger picks off sentries, putting arrows between armor plates. 

Most stealth games though, avoid multiplayer completely. I frequently lament that I can’t take out targets as agents 47 and 46. Most of these games, to me, feel like they would be better with a friend. Now a part of that is certainly because most things are better with friends but, secondarily, these games are difficult. Having a friend to help could both ease the game of chess you play in every encounter or allow creators to add differing levels of complexity. 

I could talk about the possibilities for, maybe literally, days. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. At least not today. If very few stealth franchises build out co-op experiences, a fraction of those games create adversarial multiplayer. Splinter Cell has tried it. Spies vs Mercs, a mode that pitches Splinter Cell agents against NPC-esque mercenaries, leverages darkness and verticality against mercs with flashlights. It’s, as I previously described, brilliant. By pitting factions against each other with different abilities to navigate the gamespace, adhering to the stealth game loop is the only thing that gives the spies an advantage. 

Assassin’s Creed also dabbled in multiplayer. Both PvP and PvE. The latter, while promising, fell victim to the extremely buggy launch of Assassin’s Creed Unity. Network issues, net code issues, strange pop-in, the experience was fractured from the start. The former, PvP variant, was introduced with the release of AC Brotherhood. Across a handful of game modes, and choosing between an impressive lineup of characters, players hunted each other down across crowded maps utilizing a number of distractive, offensive, and defensive abilities. 

The Brotherhood multiplayer was great in the first few weeks, but as time progressed players became savvy to the underlying systems and within months of release the idea of “Stealth” all but disappeared. The reasons, I believe, are perhaps why so many stealth games leave this feature off of the list: Balance and participation.

A few weeks ago Hood: Outlaws and Legends came out and a group of friends and I grabbed it up. At only thirty dollars it was kinda hard not to just grab it and give it a shot. Hood takes place in the Robin Hood universe (mythos?) and tasks players to cooperatively - stealthily - infiltrate an area, track down the Sheriff, pickpocket a vault key from him, and then abscond with the loot in said vault. It’s like Payday with a bow and arrow. 

Pulling off these heists is actually pretty fun. The PvE (versus AI only) mode allows you to dig into the mechanics of the game while working out the kinks in your team communication. Before long we were complimenting well placed shots and perfect dual takedowns as we carved our way to our prize. The formula is solid, if a bit repetitious. The requirements don’t change at all between maps. The location of the vault chest will move around from heist to heist, but that is really it; and after a few rounds we had grown a bit too familiar with the process. The game also randomly chooses the maps in this mode, so we ended up playing two maps in three games, which was a bit of a bummer. Also your XP gain is dramatically limited in this AI centered mode, which pushed us quickly into the game’s core mode: heists against competing human players.

The formula doesn’t really change for this PvPvE mode, save the fact that at the same time you are hunting for the Sheriff, his key, and then the vault, another team is as well. Initially the prospect of this dynamic was interesting, but pretty quickly it devolved.

This was when I realized multiplayer stealth is critically dependent on its players participating in the right way. Now some games incentivize this participation or choose to restrict your abilities altogether. Think AC: Brotherhoods scoring system for kills which took points from you for being loud or conspicuous. Spies vs Mercs restricts teams abilities based on their faction. Mercs literally cannot hide in the dark. Spies will not win a gunfight. 

Hood doesn’t really build any advantage or disadvantages into its gameplay loop. We started our first round of PvPvE and began to sneak around the map the same way we were in the PvE mode. Being seen by guards locks the area you are in down. They close all the gates and begin hunting for you. Against AI this was a paradigm shift. The whole group has to go into ghost mode or just shelter in place until the heightened awareness drips away with the invisible clock. In multiplayer you get notified if your opponents incur a lockdown. This is done presumably to give you a brief jolt of encouragement. Thoughts dart across your mind, “They are locked down, they got caught, we have a few minutes to creep ahead and really gain an advantage. 

Only that wasn’t the case. 

Ryan and I stopped playing the Brotherhood multiplayer a few months in. It was nearly impossible to play the game by its own rules. Shooting a target with your wrist mounted pistol was always the worst way to pull off a kill, but useful if your target just kept evading you. You received a meager serving of points and would move back into the crowd in an attempt to reestablish yourself as an agent of stealth. By the end of the first month people were sprinting across rooftops, shooting down into the crowd, and then running off to do it again. They had discovered that if you ran around on the rooftops it didn’t raise your profile and that picking off a target from a rooftop with a gun, the penalty wouldn’t be enforced unless you killed a second target. First kills in this method would rack around 1800 points, the second kill a measly 300 (the numbers may be way off here, its been years. It’s the proportion that’s important. 

The second kill was the system working, discouraging loud tactics with point penalties. But if you went and hid, let the system time out, and then did it again, you could farm high point value kills in perhaps the least clandestine way possible. Brotherhood became a shooting gallery. It was absolutely untenable. Assassin’s Creed would get away from adversarial multiplayer after Black Flag. I barely returned for Revelations. 

As we were creeping through the bushes in a castle courtyard, our band of merry thieves, we got the first notification that our opponents had triggered an alarm. A wave of relief hit the crew. We’ve got some time. Then the second notification came, then the third, then a fourth. Our relief was subsumed by a revelation: they are just ignoring the stealth altogether. What followed was a painfully reminiscent race to the objectives ignoring area guards altogether (If a gate got dropped each team had a character that could just lift the gate). Our opponents got the key first, found the vault first, and moved the prize first. Each time we got close we were either picked off by a camping Robin, thatching us through the reeds with pinpoint accuracy, or we got bodied by the two melee characters Tooke and John.

Dying, spawning, and running back to the objective is a drag in any game. In a game where you have to make a getaway, every second you have to run back to the last place you saw the objective is a second of distance they get to make. Combat felt clunky and secondary to a stealth system that had been completely abandoned. Knowing that your opponent trips an alarm is incredibly useful, but knowing when they got the key, that they had found the vault, and having a tracker for how far the chest was moving was a bit much. I kept thinking about how much cooler it would have been if we had found the Sheriff only to discover the key was already gone. Imagine coming across a vault that had been looted already, your team scrambling desperately to find out how far their opponents had gotten. 

Still, none of this works players don’t abide by an invisible set of rules, therefore relying on those rules just ends up feeling like a mistake. A private lobby with eight people, all who agree to be stealthy is one thing, hoping that the community at large adopts that mindset is, ever more clearly, dependent on systems. The question is, in an industry that builds to player’s fantasies of power, how do you implement these systems and simultaneously empower players while also guiding their play-style along the path you desire?

How do you penalize running around like Rambo adequately? How do you incentivize stealth to make it the only way players want to engage?

Get your first look at Halloween's Haddonfield Heights map

Asymmetrical multiplayer title Predator: Hunting Grounds getting a fresh host of updates

Project: Playtime is the next game in what I will lovingly refer to as the Tag Type Game genre. Well specifically the Horror Themed Tag Type Game subgenre. Think your Dead By Daylights and VHSs of the world. This time around instead of a spooky alternate dimension or a horror film infested high school, we are instead in the depths of Playtime Co. I've personally been a big fan of the increasingly popular "Mascot Horror" IPs. Basically a Horror world where instead of ghouls or vampires, the monsters are family friendly entertainment turned evil. In Project: Playtime's case this means a vacant toy factory which serves as the hunting ground for a twisted and hungry toy.

Being a Tag Type Game Project: Playtime will drop you into one of two roles. Oddly enough unlike most games in the genre you can't straight up choose which role you would like. Instead the role of Monster will be randomly doled out to one of the players in a lobby, somewhat similar to an imposter style game like Among Us. The lack of choice does mean it's easier to find matches as everyone is funneled through one queue but it also means players that prefer playing the monster could go an entire day without touching the role. I can understand the temptation to not have a role with significantly longer queue times than other roles, especially in an Indie multiplayer game. That being said hopefully in the future there can be more options so players who prefer playing the Monster can play them more frequently.

Regardless once you are all placed in your assigned role the game of Tag begins. In this take on the game Survivors need to roam the map solving these pillars with puzzles on 3 separate sides. The puzzles themself are rather simple, but for players with memory issues or slow reflexes I can see them becoming a rather big barrier to entry. There are some perks that alleviate the difficulty of these puzzles, but that would still require you to play a significant amount of time in order to solve said puzzles. I hope this is something the developers consider as they continue to balance the game. A big plus for this genre is it's simplicity, allowing for many different kinds of people to play together regardless of their mechanical skill level.

One thing I do appreciate about these puzzles, and the rest of the survivor gameplay is how everything is done with your Grabpack. You see you have this little backpack with two hands on it and you can shoot these hands like a grappling hook. Pretty much every survivor mechanic uses this hands, which means you never have to deal with any sort of UI based quick time event. Everything you're doing is in universe. Whether you're shooting your hand at a grappling spot to swing over a gap or slapping at hungry toys crawling out of the walls as you wait for an ally to rescue you. Everything just feels much better when things feel grounded and make sense with your moveset. They could have easily made it so you would need to walk to a pit then have a pop up that says "PRESS E TO SAVE ALLY", but they went through the effort to make sure everything feels immersive, having you physically shoot your hand into the abyss and pull your buddy out like you do everything else in the game.

Once you have finished a puzzle pillar you'll receive a piece of a toy, you can take it to a deposit and once you've rounded up 6 of them you can send them through a tube, hop on a train and finally get out of there. Playing as the runners in games like this is typically pretty simple but I do like how Project: Playtime spices it up a bit more with fancy movement objects like the grapple spots as well as the more interactive puzzle spots over the passive generators of other games. The puzzles themselves may get repetitive, but hopefully the developers can add a bit more variety to them in the future. Really though, the real key to making playing as a survivor fun in these types of games is to get the monster gameplay right.

For the monster, in this game of tag you are "It". So your primary objective is to catch the survivors and stop them from completing their puzzles and depositing their toy parts. Each monster has an entirely unique way to help you accomplish this. Whether it's Boxy Boo's lullaby telling you when survivors are close by, or Mommy Long Legs grapple arm letting you get to anywhere on the map as long as you can reach it. While there are only 3 monsters so far it is nice how much variety there is, they all have a lot of abilities almost feeling akin to a hero shooter style of character. My personal favorite so far is Boxy Boo, mostly for his design but also because he can charge up his spring-like legs and leap across the map. It's incredibly satisfying to land on a small platform a whole two stories above you, grapple a survivor and feed them to the pit.

It can be pretty exciting to play as the monster but just like with all of these Tag Type Games it's a difficult balancing act to pull off. The monsters HAVE to be strong but they can't be too strong or else it'd feel unfair to the survivor. Then if their too weak you can end up in a situation where the survivors can bully the monster and exploit their shortcomings. The game is still too new so it's difficult to say where Project: Playtime lands on that scale but for now I want to say it's a bit too survivor leaning at the moment. Survivors can be incredibly agile and with perks they can complete their tasks very quickly. As a monster you could be chasing one guy for a minute and check the corner of the screen and see the survivors have already deposited 4 out of 6 toy parts. When the heck did that happen? I think some random elements could be put in place to make it more fair to the monster. As of right now the puzzle pillars and deposits are always placed in the same location which gives the survivors a huge knowledge advantage. Sure the Monster can see the puzzle pillars through walls, but what does that matter to a survivor that has played for 5 hours and has committed them to memory? Spicing up the layout may be the edge the Monster needs to feel a bit more balanced.

All in all the gameplay of both the Survivors and Monsters is very fun if not a bit repetitive. Hopefully by the time the game comes out of early access the game will have a much stronger balance between the two roles, maybe have a way to choose which one you want to play as well as sorting out the massive list of bugs and general lack of polish. Yes there are a ton of bugs, on top of unfinished UI and a somewhat barren soundscape. The game does feel like it launched a few months too early but there's no taking it back now, just like how there's no taking back the money you spent on the season 1 battle pass.

A Way to be Dead asymmetrical multiplayer game coming to Linux at launch with Windows PC. Thanks to details from developer Crania Games. The game just released last month via Steam Early Access. Crania Games developer will let you choose to fight in the infestation. But you can also become a zombie and kill anything that walks. So it's your choice, but the A Way to be Dead fun is mandatory. And so is Linux support, according to the recent developer reply.

We focused to content on PC while we are Early Access. After full release, we would like to port our game to consoles and Linux.

This is the comment recently posted in the Discussion thread. Do note that full release is due to arrive "late 2022". The game is being developed using Unreal Engine 4, plus this it's very inexpensive. With a small increased expected for the full release.

A Way to be Dead - Launch Trailer

A Way to be Dead is an asymmetrical multiplayer (4 vs 1) horror game. Here a bewildered doctor is on the hunt for a group of victims who are just trying to escape. Players can take on the role of Dr. Riley, the victims, or even the zombies. While the action unfolds and the frenetic multiplayer action ensures. The player witnesses the events of Roots Of Insanity from an entirely new view.

Features:

Play as undeads, victims, and killer

Ability to improve the character using the Skill points gained by winning sessions

Environmental elements can cause the victims to raise a lot of noise. Dong so A Way to be Dead victims, avoid them. As a killer, use the relevant visual and aural notifications. All due to tracik down your prey!

Multiple paths to choose to move around in the maps. As victims, scatter around using the underground tunnels safely and reach key points quickly. Then as killer, create an ambush around those key points.

As victims try to remain stealthy. As a killer, track down the aural and visual cues of noises to find your prey!

Help the other victims and escape together. You can also turn into undead and get left behind forever.

Customize all the variables in a A Way to be Dead match. Duration until the lights are shut off, the number of undead, and loot ratios.

Completely handcrafted sections with many interconnecting paths and various themes. Such as sewers, open spaces, level traps and dark corners of the buildings. Additional maps are in the process of creation.

OBEY asymmetrical multiplayer action game launches on Linux, Mac and Windows PC. Thanks to developer Dez. Which is now out of Early Access on Humble Store and Steam. The Lo-Fi Apocalypse announces its asymmetrical multiplayer game OBEY. Which has also launched out of Early Access. Now available with a big discount on Steam. We've all played games where you send commands to teammates or AI units. OBEY instead puts you in the position to command your enemies (human opponents). And to be commanded by them. Players are also free to obey/disobey.

OBEY - Official Game Trailer

OBEY is a unique multiplayer action game. Since winning means bribing and bully your enemies into helping you win. And making themselves lose. Therefore to win, a player must make the most money by the end of the round. To make money the fastest, you must control the Robo. This allows you to push your will by using deadly force. As long as you can find any rivals hiding in the dark. However, experienced OBEY players know how the game works. Since it is not always in your interest to simply kill the approaching enemies. But instead entice opponents to do you bidding. And that's where things get interesting!

Features:

Unique asymetrical multiplayer gameplay mechanics

Social and mental King-of-the-hill gameplay

Stealth Gameplay mechanics

Supports user created maps

A buffet of items to creatively influence or trick opponents in OBEY

A complex world that allows for almost unlimited forms of deception

Emergent gameplay springs from player psychology and self interest

Explosive effects

Really cool robot to control and explode bunnies with

No internet connection required with local LAN support