Awesome post. You make a bunch of great points.
The mountain for multiplayer is providing players with the power fantasy at similar rates single player does.
I do recall this early Halo trailer (timestamped) where I thought players were going to play as Marines, collect some kind of resource (credits) during gameplay, and call down (play as) a Spartan once they collected enough.
That would have given players the power fantasy in a PvP setting but it only works if players are Marines ~90 percent of the time and Spartans ~10 percent of the time. Single player gives it to players almost all the time.
Asymmetrical gameplay currently has a lot of resistance among gamers. Everything powerful added to Fortnite gets nerfed and eventually removed after the community complains long enough. It seems like most games experience the same phenomenon from my perspective. But I do wonder if players would put up with being the Frodo (LotR) character as long as the stealth, retreat, defensive options are entertaining enough and the end reward is large enough.
I would actually have loved to play marines in Halo Infinite.
If you ever played Battlefield 1, the Super Classes and even the Behemoths were basically the protagonists.....the rest of us were grunts.
If I wasnt the super class or behemoth id work my ass off to help them survive as long as possible.
So if the situation was I log in and sometimes im chief sometimes im the marines.....i would actually be game.
Id just need to be chief exactly where I left off yesterday.
The real pressure with Asym gaming is balancing the fun for the weaker side.
In most cases the only way to do this is to make you being weak a selling point....i.e the game is effectively a horror game for everyone who isnt playing the strong role.
If you remember the game Evolve.....which I supported from the jump and was even in closed betas.
The idea was perfect, the play tests....again perfect.
But once the game hit the wild, players just werent feeling it you have maybe one good match every 30 or something.
During playtesting the game actually felt balanced and losing didnt feel bad whether you were the monster or the hunters.
But something changed once the general population got their hands on it....ohh and they didnt have enough content drops to keep players engaged.
Balancing an Asymmetrical Multiplayer game would probably take more public betas than any developer/publisher is willing to give a game(Talking AAA here).
We do have success stories though:
- Dead by Daylight
- Friday the 13th
- Hello Neighbor - Better than Among Us dont @ me.
But none of these games really have a persistent world....which is something relatively easy to implement in a single player experience.
For MP sheesh just thinking about the backend of the game is making my keyboard shiver in fear from how hard id be smashing it trying to get everything to work.
I think every MP game that has tried to have a persistent world tied in has failed.