The Fall of the Online Lobby

When I was a wee lad Naruto was the hottest anime on the air, Linkin Park had just dropped their Minutes to Midnight album, Michael Bay was breaking the box office with Transformers, and Halo 3 was one of the hottest games released. This was actually the game that got my parents to set us up with Xbox Live, my brother, father, and I all got accounts to play Halo 3.  A lot of things from Halo 3 are nostalgic for me, but what has recently come back to my mind is its lobby system, a system so good that even Call of Duty copied it.

In this era of gaming, when you start playing matchmaking you get taken to a pre-game lobby where you can mingle with other players, vote on map and modes, and listen to slurs dropped by 12-year-olds. Outside of those slurs this system was great, it let you get a feel for who you were playing with or against, and let players choose which maps they actually want to play. After the match you got to choose whether to stick with those people or bail.

It's something Halo 2 multiplayer lead, Max Hoberman, referred to as "The Virtual Couch." That feeling of randomly linking with people and not knowing what'll happen. Maybe you'll connect with them and make new friends. Or maybe you get smoked by a camper in COD and get inspired to become the best at speed so you can show him what happens when his camping spot gains an extra 100% lead volume.

The lobby system is one of those things that got nailed on the first go, it didn't really need to be improved. Mind you I'm not a game dev so there might be a better way to do it, but I can't think of it. It was a great system for encouraging player interaction and player choice.

And it's gone.

Just gone, gradually, slowly, year by year it was taken away. Now multiplayer games just throw you straight into the game with no prep time, no ability to do anything while the game loads up. You can't choose your map, you can't mingle, no ability to get a feel for the people you're playing with or against. You don't even get the option to stick with the people you just played with, just back to the menu with no choice to socialize.

Now if you get a map you don't like? All you can do is quit. Enjoyed trash talking or working with those other players? Too bad, gotta dig through 20 menus to find your recently played. If I ever hear stuff like "designing for designing sake" or "breaking what isn't broken" I think of how online lobbies were broken, because this is a tragedy.

Now it isn't bad for every game, Fortnite matches have a "one and done" design, where you get no respawns and games can go for 20-30 minutes. It means that leaving when you die is the norm so having a party up system wouldn't really make much sense. Though Fortnite does actually have a pregame lobby for mingling, mostly to show off emotes and to do something while the other 99 players are found. But even then that design wasn't mandatory.

But for games like COD and Halo it sorta was, those games were basically party games at their soul. And the classic online lobby system complimented that. Now COD and Halo did try to replace that soul, unfortunately, with an emphasis on Skill Based Match Making. Depending on who you are the very term made you shrug, get confused, or start ripping out your hair. 

Skill Based Match Making (SBMM) is how you're matched up with other players. If you're getting good you'll get higher skilled players, if you're bad you get placed with lower skilled players. It's a system designed to ensure the guy with the golden gun and reflexes of a cat on crack doesn't mow down the level 1 noob who's trying to figure out where the trigger is.

SBMM has actually existed for a long time, even in Halo 2's design, so it's not inherently bad as some would have you believe. The difference is that lately, it feels like SBMM has been taken into overdrive. Namely with COD and Halo, which feel a lot sweatier than when I was a wee lad. Combined with the inability to party up, it really feels like these games have replaced the "Virtual Couch" with a constant grindfest, where your only relief is the shop to buy new skins.

Maybe I'm just getting that boomer mindset as I get older, but I really miss the old system. It felt livelier and more random, when your matches really did feel like a lobby. Like a bunch of friends gathering for a game of Goldeneye but with Oddjob replaced by One Man Army noobtubes. That system has been gone for years though, and what's in its place feels hollow and lonely. Maybe it'll come back one day, we can only hope.