The ways some games stride for a cinematic feel to their main story, most of the time they can't and don't work as a multiplayer game.
As long as developers bother with a single player experience (most games demand it) I doubt they'll go away.
Multiplayer is a sad excuse to extend a title's lasting appeal in most cases. It's not a fad that will go away, but sooner or later they will have to noticed that listening to fan requests hurts their artistic freedom
__________________
"When Gotham is ashes, you have my permission to die." -BANE
Gender: Male Location: In Luna's mane, chasing STAAARS!
I want the single-player to live forever. To me, because of the multiplayer, games get very short single-player campaigns *cough*ODST*cough*. Seriously though, I don't see what's awesome about multiplayer. Most excuses from most gamers say "in Multiplayer, we get to pwn some noobs". Seriously people, can't you think of a better excuse than that?
The lone wolf shall live while the herd of wolves die.
Gender: Male Location: In Luna's mane, chasing STAAARS!
Bad single player most definitely but what about good single player? With teams focusing on multiplayer, single player is reduced to small hours and it seems rare to have good single player games like Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2. It's long and unlike some games, has a lot of effort put into the plot and characters without feeling dull.
MP + SP games have been around forever. Doom had a MP component (granted it wasn't the easiest thing to use) but the idea that MP is reducing SP games is kind of far fetched.
There is more pure SP games then there is pure MP games out now. L4D is one of the exceptions but most games coming out today offer both modes because it's pretty much norm. Games like Zelda, RPG's do really well because they offer a SP game.
Madden developers released info stating that only 50% of Madde owners play it online. That's a pretty significant number of people who only play it SP.
Playing with friends is enormously fun. In fact, playing with friends either against each other or a machine was one of the reasons video games came into existence in the first place. It has then taken a long time for the whole idea of 'playing with friends' to come to life, wit the advent of the net etc., but that was always goign to take a heavy focus. It is good that there is a lot of thinking about multiplayer, especially co-op.
But te thing is... we often hear stories about single player being under threat. It's odd, because single player has far mroe still to be done with it than multiplayer. With multiplayer, especially competitive multiplayer, all that is left to do is to perfect the communications technology so there is no lag. Then... that's it. That is as far as that sort of multiplayer can ever go, because the one thing game designers cannot make better is people.
In single player, things like AI are still in their infancy. We've got forever and a day for all of the facets that make single player decent to keep improving, because the technology is still way behind the only possible limit for single player, which is how good the story is and even that only applies to certain genres.
What happens when we have AI that is as challenging and entertaining as another human opponent? The obsession with multiplayer might not be what it was.
I still love co-op stuff though, and that really is a category of its own. Left 4 Dead is trying to push the AI envelope in that area.
__________________
"We've got maybe seconds before Darth Rosenberg grinds everybody into Jawa burgers and not one of you buds has the midi-chlorians to stop her!"
Even if with have AI that can compete realistically with humans (I don't mean Dark Sim for Perfect Dark), the social aspect of MP will still be there and will still be the draw of it.
KMC Community Forums
Oct 19th, 2009 12:49 AM
