Pretty much. If there's an edge or dominant strategy to be found and exploited, and there nearly always is, then rest assured it will be found and exploited. People are smart like that.SuXoR wrote:It also unlocks the hellhole of combat and physics glitch abuses that will dominate multiplayer games. All of the exploits of the engine, environment, and combat systems will likely make multiplayer very annoying unless wolfire constantly updates and patches the game. Also servers..
And this can also have the side-effect of fundamentally skewing the way the game is played - partly because of the natural tendency to exploit the system to gain an advantage, but also because human opponents require different tactics to computer opponents. If, for instance, close combat was very twitchy, and people discovered that they win more often by throwing knives at their opponent than engaging in close combat, with or without weapons, then the feel of the gameplay would be quite different from the single-player... at least until the patch which nerfs throwing knives but leaves wolves a bit too powerful.
Mount&Blade is a good case in point for this - designed initially as a single-player game, until the engine was revised to add multiplayer in Warband. I had always wanted to see this in Mount&Blade - I thought the complexity of fighting a smart opponent would take the game to another level, where teams could use intelligent tactics to gain the upper hand on the battlefield - but after fighting against other players online I no longer recognised the game I had so enjoyed playing alone: the reality of the implementation did not align with (admittedly naive) expectations. Not that the strategies the players devised were stupid (I doubt I would have discovered them myself if they weren't already used ubiquitously), but they simply belonged to a level of metagaming that I wasn't interested in.
I probably wasn't alone. There were servers dedicated to dueling, for instance, where people were expected to use melee weapons only and had to wait to engage opponents 1 vs. 1. The game didn't enforce this as far as I am aware, just people who didn't want to have to play as an archer or knight to compete with other players, and although it eschewed the popular way of resolving mass melees by skewering people from behind there was still a large emphasis on who could make contact with their weapon the quickest (by moving and turning in a certain direction whilst swinging your weapon). Imagine the leg sweep in Overgrowth coming down to that, positioning your avatar in such a way so that the game registers your attack closer to the beginning of its sweep than your opponents.
In an attempt to balance the game, I think the developers also introduced numerous mechanics such as kicking, breaking blocks with heavy weapons, becoming unbalanced if swinging with certain weapons, and changing stances with spears to better combat cavalry. Personally, it just seemed to make things more convoluted because the game wasn't designed with multiplayer in mind to begin with, and no amount of extra abilities is going to achieve that balance. (Course, you could argue that even games designed specifically to be played competitively between multiple people are never perfectly balanced, but you stand a better chance of achieving a happy balance if you allow it to influence the way the game is designed early on.
This essentially is the problem with adding the kind of competitive multiplayer in Overgrowth that the OP is asking for. To work well it has to be planned and designed as part of the game from an early stage (like Starcraft or Streetfighter), and not tacked on as an afterthought or a novelty, which entertains people for a short while but ultimately lacks the depth/richness of gameplay to keep people competing for a long time.
For example, if maps which are currently designed to be played in single player were to be used for multiplayer they would also need to be designed to keep the movement of players flowing around the map and not constantly gravitating towards the same small area (otherwise you'll get bored of it quickly), and you also have to give places strategic weakness to maintain balance (so no ledges and towers only accessible by climbing where someone could simply wait and kick other players off as they pull themselves up). Then with the gameplay itself, you have to prevent any one element (weapon/attack/creature) from being dominant, usually by introducing as many levels of strategic depth as possible, encouraging players to out-think their opponents and anticipate their actions (I think the word "Yomi" in Japanese means something to this effect). So you have your first level of depth, the basic attack, but then there is a second level which you can use to counter the basic attack, and if you guess that your opponent will open with the second level attack there should be something you can do to counter that. And so on. The more levels the better. The best multiplayer games have lots of layers, and also allows the inexperienced player to occasionally win, e.g. when the experienced player is so used to countering the second level or third level of opening attack, and so doesn't expect his opponent to open with the most obvious first level of attack (which thus is itself a counter of higher levels of attack and bring things full circle to ensure the mindgames never stop). Imagine doing that for each form of attack, each weapon, each creature, and even locations or routes in maps if you plan on CTF.
Endoperez already brought up financial and time-related reasons why this specific kind of multiplayer - the hardest kind - might not represent a worthwhile investment to the Wolfire team, especially when one of their aims is to capture the experience of cinematic combat (which would be even harder to achieve in multiplayer given the reasons I stated above). That's not to say that no kind of multiplayer could work, or that I wouldn't want to see competitive multiplayer if it could be done well - it's just, with a team of this size (talented though it is), it's a very big ask.
