Continuing last week's look at multiplayer gaming, we bring you an in-depth look at what the future might hold.
Keith Stuart

Variety is the spice of multiplayer gaming. Deathmatch frag-fests have their time and place, but there's more to life than shooting people. Now that developers have stopped bunging multiplayer levels onto games as an afterthought, they're creating more interesting scenarios. Star Wars X Wing Alliance, for example, offers a whole host of detailed multiplayer-specific missions, and it even allows you to indulge in spacecraft races with fellow gamers. Meanwhile, Age of Empires II has a game option called 'regicide' where you have to protect your monarch from assassination, and Psygnosis' Lander has a variation on pass the parcel - with a ticking bomb. The more variations developers can find on the standard 'deathmatch' and 'capture the flag' modes, the more multiplayer gaming will appear an attractive proposition.

A decent range of in-game objects is also a must. New first-person shooters need weapons as good as the rocket launchers, remote-activated mines and sniper rifles we've already seen, while online realtime strategies need units Westwood, Blizzard and Cave Dog haven't even dreamed of. Right across the board, too many developers are waiting to see what id and co. come up with and are then copying them. For heaven's sake, multiplayer gaming is only just coming into its own, isn't it a bit early to start bandwagon jumping?

The future means...
1) Co-operation. 'Teamplay is really going to explode in the coming years,' reckons PlanetQuake's Dave Kosak. 'Ever since the days people would play Capture-the-Flag with Quake, it's really clear that playing on a team is a blast. Team Fortress, originally written as an add-on for Quake but later updated for Half-Life, is a pointer in the right direction, forcing players to join one of two teams and contribute to planned initiatives, rather than running around alone and killing everyone else.

More current examples include Dynamic's StarSiege Tribes, a first-person robot shoot 'em up which offers a variety of team-based multiplayer missions revolving around co-operation and strategic planning, and Multitude's Fireteam (www.fireteam.com), an Internet-only combat strategy title that allows three teams of four players to compete against each other - again with a co-operative, tactical bias. Online co-operation engenders a sense of community and team spirit - it's what truly separates this experience from playing against a computer.