Xbox Live Clubs Keep Smaller Gaming Communities Alive

The presence of a good, passionate, reliable community makes or breaks any game with a focus on multiplayer, but good community tools don't tend to get much hype. Microsoft rolled out community tools late last year—Looking for Group and Clubs—that are doing wonders for smaller communities on Xbox Live.

Clubs enable players to create and join—you guessed it—clubs, which in turn are linked to games. Once accepted into a club, you gain access to a wealth of community features: a list of all active members, group chat, online status updates and shared achievements. The whole thing operates much like a Facebook group.

Looking for Group—or LFG—is also fairly self-explanatory. It lets players search for companions to join them in multiplayer sessions, with a multitude of variables available for adjustment: number of players needed, what the activity is exactly, and when it's going down.

Naturally, popular games have immediately benefitted from this set-up—it's never been easier to get a Destiny crew together. But for titles that are rather less known than Bungie's quaint little shooter, the Clubs and LFG systems are an absolute godsend.

Necropolis is a multiplayer action game with roguelike elements, made by Kirkland-based Hairbrained Schemes and released in the summer of 2016. In it, players descend through increasingly difficult levels of the titular structure. The combat has the faintest whiff of Dark Souls about it, albeit nowhere near as meticulous, and enemies tend to come at you in larger groups than From Software's game(s). Playing alone can be an impossible challenge.

As the game was engineered to be best experienced in co-op, Necropolis players need pals to get the most of their dungeon crawling. This can be a pain to arrange for a game that launched to no fanfare, with some pesky bugs that have since been remedied. Its community is thinner than a third cup of tea from the same bag.

Adding to Necropolis' misery at launch was a lack of matchmaking—albeit, with somewhat understandable reasons. "Friendly fire" is a constant hazard, and with permadeath looming over every player's head, griefing from random matchmaking could have outright killed the game. But all the same, a game so reliant on playing with others cannot afford to launch without a suitable solution to co-op. Which is where Xbox Clubs has belatedly filled a gap.

Through Clubs, Necropolis has found a small but engaged community of around 370 members—just enough to save the game from certain doom. That's tiny as far as player-bases go—at the other end of the scale, Overwatch passed 25 million registered players in January 2017, while League of Legends has over 100 million monthly users (as estimated by Riot). But every one of these 370-odd players is here to play Necropolis, with others, and every time I've gone into the game I've always been able to find a partner or two to explore the deadly labyrinth with.

Like any activity where you meet up with strangers, it's down to luck whether you find a decent gaming companion, or someone you want to immediately run the other way from. But the use of tags in Clubs allows players to filter for the right kind of co-op buddy. You can add "no swearing" to avoid having someone screaming obscenities into their microphone. "New players welcome" is, obviously enough, a sign that you're willing to be a guide for a while and help newcomers find their feet. Harambe still doing it for you? Pop "do it for Harambe" onto your settings and see where it leads. LFG also uses tags, a terrific time-saver when all you want to do is hit a raid in Destiny, or enjoy some private Overwatch battles.

The digital board game Armello—released in September 2015 by Melbourne's League of Geeks—has also benefitted from the introduction of Clubs. I've never found a match when using the game's own matchmaking system—but through the Armello club, I've been more successful. It's all relative, of course, with the club only having 94 members. But when you just need three people for a decent game, the club is a great way to organize a satisfying session of wolves thwacking rabbits with great big swords.

LFGs and gaming communities are nothing new, but the fact that Xbox now has these features built into the console itself makes them so much more accessible to the average player. They're a great convenience, and directly accessible from the dashboard. Inevitably, there has been a significant uptake from communities large and small.

Other developers with specialist-interest titles would be wise to see how they can take advantage of the feature, setting up official clubs to keep early adopters engaged. Equally, Microsoft can yet do more to push the benefits of these features, to games makers and players alike. Playing's just better when it's shared, so much of the time—and Clubs and LFG are helping to make that sharing both safer, friendlier, and a lot more fun.

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