This scene from “Buccaneer Bunny” from May 8, 1948 came to mind when I was playing some multiplayer games lately. Like many people in these troubled times, the only way to keep in touch with most of my friends and acquaintances is virtually…including in multiplayer games. One of those games, of course was Atlas. For those unaware Atlas is like the poor cousin of the game Ark Survival Evolved (the former being about wooden sailing ships and the latter being about dinosaurs). In fact there are many players would would tell you the developers simply winched up the dinosaurs, and slid in the sailing ships on the same game.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be much of an end game unless you like to sail about the seas blasting the bejeebus out of each other. Like any other game getting to the point where you can make the biggest ship (or what I like to call the “uber-ship of uberness”) is a fairly enjoyable journey if you can do it with friends. But once you build the biggest sailing ship (Atlas), the biggest spaceship (Space Engineers), or acquire the biggest and best mount (just about any mmo) what do you do with it? You could, as I have suggested on Discord stomp around the quarter deck yelling “MR CHRISTIAN” all day long but that gets boring fast. Then what?
Then, my friends, you engage in the time honored art of “bank sitting”. Bank sitting (or in some cases auction house sitting) is a tradition as old as videogames. Back when the biggest game in town was Ultima Online, there was no central auction house. Instead there were small stores spread across the virtual landscape. As a result, anyone who wanted to be seen did so in front of the bank in Britannia. When I played World of Warcraft players would spend their day showing off their uber mounts of uberness in front of the auctionhouse. But Multiplayer games don’t have anywhere to bank sit. If, like me, you are past the age when you had reactions as fast as a rattlesnake on meth then pvp is really out of the question unless you enjoy getting your butt handed to you, but only after someone has worn it as a hat for awhile.
But the biggest problem I have encountered in multiplayer games is with the playerbase. Many players seem to hop from game to game like a frog on a hotplate. Unless you migrate with the rest of the players, once you start to catch up with everyone else, the server becomes an empty place. Oh there are certainly some exceptions I have encountered. Case in point is Minecraft: I still know a few die hard players that seem to keep coming back to game. Perhaps this exception, like Michael Corleone in the Godfather, is what keeps puling back in, just when I think I am out. Eventually I will probably learn my lesson and I will stage a mutiny on multiplayer games.
See you online,
The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team