Earlier this week, the first trailer dropped for the new, gamified rendition of Friday the 13th. It’s the second game in a relatively short period to ape the ‘slasher movie’ format, but where the rather unfortunate Until Dawn had you shepherding the standard gaggle of horny teenagers through the night in the hopes of most of them surviving, 13th will be a multiplayer-focused affair. One player will take the role of Jason Vorhees, whilst the other 7 take on the roles of the would-be victims.
This is known as asymmetric multiplayer, in which teams are counterbalanced by different abilities and/or numbers. It’s not exactly new, Left 4 Dead remains the most successful example, but rarely do they feature one group against one sole player. If this version of the concept sounds eerily familiar, it’s because there was one other game, released earlier this year, which tried to effectively apply that formula: Evolve.
Sad to say, it didn’t really work. The game sold relatively well but received mixed reviews, and was largely called out for feeling insubstantial and limited. Some of the flack came from the fact that despite only really offering a few different variations on one mode, the game was marketed and sold as a full price game, but so many games these days try and get away with that shit it’s unfair to hold Evolve solely responsible. What Evolve did, and what 13th will likely continue to do, was demonstrate a concept with huge potential that hasn’t been fully exploited. Will it ever be, though?
About a quadrillion years ago, whilst fiddling around with the custom tools on the Halo 3 multiplayer, I developed what I referred to as ‘Predator Mode’. It was a variation on Juggernaut Mode, but rather than all the players rushing over each other, desperately vying to bring down one overpowered one, the upgraded player was granted enhanced stealth, increased speed, a higher jump, a plasma sword and some kind of decent long range weapon. The others had to work as a team to bring them down, rather than against one another. You get why I gave it that name now, I trust.
It caught on with my friends for a while, and I doubt I’m the only person ever to try it out, because it demonstrated that increased power could very effectively balance out with superior numbers and teamwork. More to the point, in most online multiplayer, at least of the ultraviolent variety, teamwork is encouraged, but not essential. I noticed during the recent Star Wars: Battlefront beta that even though the maps and gameplay were designed from the ground up to reward co-ordinated, co-operative play, it just never happened. All anyone was ever out to do was rack up kills, and any time a vehicle or hero token popped up, players would converge on it like moths to a supernova.
The issue is with team play that if the scoring system rewards personal gain as much as or more than team gain, people just will not give a shit. The only time, throughout the entire beta that I saw the grotesquely one-sided Hoth mission go the Rebel’s way is when we came up against a team that were astonishingly communicative and organised. The walkers didn’t even make it to the second checkpoint, they had a group positioned on the ridge near the first spawn point pushing the troopers back whilst another group guarded the comms array and the remainder flew around, bombarding the walkers every time the shields went down. It was beautiful.
With asymmetric multiplayer, that kind of unity isn’t only encouraged, it’s compulsory. If you’re the sole aggressor, you can do whatever you want, but if you’re on the team and you don’t do your bit, everybody loses out, especially considering the fact that in that format, if you die, you usually don’t come back. In Left 4 Dead losing one of the four members even late into the level was often absolutely disastrous, even if all the others needed to do was find you again, usually locked in a cupboard somewhere out of the way. There’s many a hilarious gameplay video of some deluded twatamaboob deciding that they would rather go it alone, only to be decimated by just about every type of zombie the game has to offer.
In this sense, this kind of gaming has a great deal to offer, especially since AI can’t satisfyingly account for either side. Fight any boss in any games enough times and you learn its pattern and often in co-op situations it simply cannot handle multiple players attacking it all at once. On the opposite end of the spectrum, fighting an elite group of AI enemies as a hypermegabeast doesn’t have anywhere near the same allure as when they’re human, and more susceptible to things like panic, bullheadedness and unorthodox strategies. NPCs are too co-ordinated, they work together too well for it to feel organic.
So, with Evolve having largely let the side down, will Friday the 13th be the proof-of-concept trailblazer? My gut says no. Here’s one main reason, let me list the primary locations of the 13th films, in order: a cabin by a lake, the same cabin by a lake, a nearby secluded farmhouse, a cabin by a lake, a secluded halfway house, that first cabin again, and again… You get the idea. The series does travel to more varied locations later on, like Manhattan and outer space but somehow I doubt any of that will make it into this game. It’s far more likely that, yes, it will be cabin by a lake, and there’s not a great deal of mileage to be drawn from that, really. I imagine the sneaking element will be well executed, but the whole framing concept will get old very quickly.
The best iterations of this format to date were all condensed modes of much larger games, like the Predator Mode (no relation) in Far Cry: Instincts Predator but as far as a dedicated title goes, you would need to be able to offer enough of a variety of maps and scenarios that it stayed consistently fresh. Given the team aspect, it could never really work in short form, since getting 5 or 6 people together to gradually progress through an hours long campaign would be a logistical nightmare. I guess what’s needed is a more expansive version of what Evolve was offering, more maps, more monsters, deeper team management and more custom options to fiddle around with. I’m honestly surprised that nobody has ever tried to create a modded asymmetric game based on the actual Predator films. It seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult and you could set modes in just about any place or period in history you wanted.
It’s just too good of a concept to let fall by the wayside and while there will be plenty of other kinds of asymmetric multiplayer games to be had as this new generation develops, we just have to hope that this version keeps finding keen minds to experiment with it. An aside – Shadow of the Colossus was originally intended as an online multiplayer which pitted teams of hunters on horseback against the lumbering behemoths you see in the final game. I’m glad that’s not what it turned out to be, purely because the final version of the game was such a masterpiece of interactive storytelling, but imagine if those roaming giants had also been player-controlled? There’s a lot of untapped potential here, I hope it finds its way to the surface.
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