2016: A Retrospective – Multiplayer Online Games

For many gamers today, video games are a social medium, even a sport. Since the days of dial-up Internet and LAN parties, connections have only gotten faster, more reliable, easier, and the gaming world is connected in ways that were hardly imaginable in the early 90s. Franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Counterstrike have made video gaming a mainstream competitive pastime, and today publishers are willing to drop millions and millions of dollars on producing games that don’t even have single player missions. So what does that mean in 2016?

Blizzard first made a name for itself in the 90s, with the major RTS franchises Warcraft and StarCraft, along with the granddaddy of all ARPGs, Diablo and its sequel. But most importantly, they were responsible for what is perhaps the most successful and most well known MMORPG ever, World of Warcraft. Recent years have seen a massive decline in WoW players, but in 2016 Blizzard released bombshell that appears to be on its way to becoming an instant classic – I’m speaking of course of Overwatch.


Overwatch is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter, a concept that’s common enough. But the kicker is what this game has learned from MOBAs ( multiplayer online battle arenas) – instead of a bunch of space marines or counterterrorism operators, Overwatch features a colorful cast of heroes with their own unique skills, abilities, and personalities, all set in a somewhat cartoony, upbeat futuristic world. It has a lot of the quirky character of Valve’s Team Fortress 2, but with even more variety and room for additional content. Overwatch has been immensely popular, with over 20 million players by the fall of 2016. Oh, and the game is apparently well-known for a community that is – get this – positive and supportive, especially to new players. So, not CS:GO, apparently.



Another huge title this year that didn’t meet with such universal acclaim was Tom Clancy’s The Division, from Ubisoft. Oh, the critics loved it, and it sold really well, but it’s reception by the gaming community has been rather mixed. The Division is an online-only, open-world, third-person shooter that takes place in a plague-ravaged Manhattan and put the player in the role of an agent of the Strategic Homeland Division (the eponymous “Division”) who’s trying to figure out who or what’s behind the epidemic. The big draw for online players, however, if the Dark Zone, a PvP section of the city chock full of high-end gear and weapons. Negative reactions among players and critics, however, tended to focus on the overall bleakness of the game (duh), but also the focus on grinding and repetitive gameplay, problems with queue times for entering the PvP areas, massive amounts of hacking by other players, and traditional Ubisoft bugs. Of course, the devs are still working on trying to fix these things, so maybe it will eventually live up to the hype.




Another game that got a lot of hype was Battlefield 1, though this one seemed to lived up to it. Set during World War I, Battlefield 1 was considered a major improvement over EA/DICE’s previous installments in the series, Battlefield 4 and Battlefield Hardline. The game offered the traditional squad-based kind of gameplay fans have come to love, with a variety of exotic multiplayer maps like Arabia and the Alps that could accommodate up to 64 players. A huge range of early-20th-century weaponry and vehicles (including zeppelins and even horses!) offered a welcome diversion from the standard fare you find in these kinds of games. New multiplayer modes includes the unique “war pigeons” mode, as well as an “operations” mode, with players alternating between defense and attack (somewhat like Verdun, I guess).



Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is another juggernaut title that was released this year. While not a “pure” multiplayer game, everyone knows why Call of Duty sells so well. After bringing us to the near future with Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare takes place in a truly sci-fi distant future setting where earth has been stripped of its natural resources and humans’ only hope is to seek shelter in the stars. And so players re given all kinds of new gameplay elements, like zero-gravity environments and a whole host of futuristic weapons and gadgets. Unfortunately, the game met with fierce opposition from two kinds of people – those who don’t like the direction the series is taking in the first place, and players who are happy with or at least indifferent towards the new content, but extremely dismayed by the proliferation of cheaters on the servers and Infinity Ward’s perceived lack of interest in dealing with this problem. The game has sold well – Activision is a major AAA publisher, after all, and CoD has a very dedicated fanbase – but tellingly, not nearly as well as some of the series’ more recent installments, such as 2015’s Call of Duty: Black Ops III.



One more I’d like to add here is Bethesda’s reboot of Doom, developed by id Software (now owned by Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax). Doom takes players back to the classic struggle between space marines and demons that we first engaged in back in the 90s. And it appears to have been genuinely well received among fans of the originals, with its fast pace, open-ended levels, and ultraviolence. Also – level editor. But what Doom really managed to do right was recapture the fast-paced, absurdist multiplayer action that captivated fans back when that was a new thing. Several game modes in addition to classic deathmatch include freeze tag and a team last man-standing mode. Oh, and it also has power-ups that allow you to play as one of four different demons, with more to come.