I picked up Street Fighter IV for the 360 today after work. And, it’s pretty awesome. I suck at it, but it’s really fun. But that’s not the point of this post.
Street Fighter IV has this setting called Arcade Req. You turn it on and it makes you available for matchmaking as you play the Arcade mode offline, then when it finds a suitable opponent or needs someone for a game (based on your settings — ranked mode or player match and similar or any skill level, etc.) it’s just as if someone plopped a token in the machine at the arcade and challenges you. When you’re done, you can choose to go right back to Arcade mode where the cycle begins anew (or stay on if it’s a Player Match and keep fighting each other).
Anyway, I think this kind of thing is a much-needed option to have in a next-gen online game. Maybe it’s not great right now when the game’s new and you get sucked into an online match before you’re even able to complete one round of Arcade mode offline. No no, this mode is cool for the future. You know, months down the road when people have moved onto bigger and better games but you want to get in some Street Fighter. This will help people find games even as the community has kinda dwindled (if it does).
So that got me thinking. This’d be great to have in other games. Especially older XBLA games where the community’s completely dead and gone. You might actually find online matches for stuff like Carcasonne, Jetpac Refuelled or TMNT or what have you. It could go a long way in giving older games some new life.
I’d almost take it one step further and go system-wide with it (but not automatically put you into a game). What if for XBLA games you could set a preference so that if someone was looking for a game you’d be notified or even invited to their game, wherever you were? Like let’s say Jetpac Refuelled. No one really plays that anymore. What if one day you’re like, “gosh, I’d like to play some versus of that, but no one’s ever on?” You tick a preference box to “notify me when someone’s looking for a game” on XBL. Then — when you are online (and only then, otherwise it’d be stupid) — and someone’s searching for a Player Match game, you’d get a notificatiom or option to join that game. Or limit it to friends list-twice-or-thrice removed or “only when I’m just sitting in the dashboard” to limit the number of times you’d get notified. The system would search first for people who are just in the XBL Dashboard (not already playing another game) then extend to people who are playing a game offline, then finally to those who’re on but already in another online game in an effort to get someone to join ya.
You’d have to build it in or patch it in to games, naturally (so maybe this is something more for Xbox 720’s version of Live). If you’re the player searching for a player match on an old game you’d have to know that the system was about to do a systemwide search for an opponent. Otherwise you might just leave in frustration. So I’d imagine it’d be something like…you search for a Quick Match on Jetpac Refuelled. No one shows. In addition to the “Create match?” like you usually get (and then sit and wait forever) — have a “create match” then also “invite players interested in playing this game?” — so it automatically sends an invite to people who’ve marked that they’re interested in playing if they’re online so they could potentially join you right then. If you get a declined notice or have been waiting too long, it sends an invite to the next person down, and so on.
So that got me thinking about how to further breathe life into the old catalog of XBLA games. And that comes back to notifications/messages when a friend has beaten/bested your score. This’d be something you could toggle on/off per game, and could work real well for keeping the competition alive in something like Geometry Wars 2 or Pac-Man CE. If you’d be getting a lot of those messages, set it up so XBL sends you a digest every day or week with updates (if there are any).
Perhaps these ideas aren’t perfect, but how many XBLA games do you have in your library that you’d go back to if there was any community left for it? And what could Microsoft (or even Sony on PSN–does anyone play Calling All Cars anymore) do to resuscitate those?
Chris Johnston Video Games online play, playstation network, street fighter iv, xbox live
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