Massively Single-Player Gaming?

Massively is running an article discussing the trend in recent MMOs to enable and encourage solo play. Where the genre's early offerings, like Everquest and Ultima Online, were heavily dependent on finding other people to interact with, it's common for today's games to allow players to experience most of the content by themselves. Quoting: "It is human nature to want to be the center of attention or at least feel like the hero on some level. It's also not too far of a stretch to call members of our species generally selfish. How can you really deliver this experience if you force your players to ask for help all the time? I think this was simply a natural progression of the genre in trying to appeal to our natural traits. ... Finally, I believe it all comes down to the mighty dollar. Audiences grew and so followed the market and competition. Suddenly, you couldn't make MMOs on the cheap anymore (though a stalwart few still try). Not only are game studios focused on appealing to the solo casual gamer to maximize earnings, they also want to build in artificial time sinks to make players stick around."

Comments

I hate time sinks

[_Shad0w_]

Time sinks do not make me want to stick around, they make me want to go elsewhere. I already have a time sink in my life, it's called work. It regularly consumes 13 hours of my day, factor in an average 8 hours of sleep and that leaves me with 3 hours in which to do things like play games, eat food, etc. If the game wants me to spend time essentially doing nothing, then I'm not playing.

Re:I hate time sinks

[tnok85]

There's a difference between time sinks and solo play. Unfortunately, most 'solo play' is just a poorly disguised time sink.

When done right though, solo play is great for those of us with long hours, or on-call jobs. We can do the multiplayer portion during our time off - but I can't rightly join a group of people when I have no idea how long I'm going to be able to play, or when I can only log on for a half hour.

Having the ability to advance my character, or at least get the illusion I'm not stagnating without being forced to group is nice.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Alcoholist]

I've always been turned off by MMOs because of all the grindage they seem to make you do alone. After the one thousandth time, running around in the sticks looking for beasties to kill gets very old. I always thought grouping was the whole point of these games, but pretty well everyone I know who plays them spends most of their time doing solo stuff because they are looking to level.

I've always wondered if a game that had no leveling system might be more interesting and encourage more team play.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CarpetShark]

I already have a time sink in my life, it's called work. It regularly consumes 13 hours of my day, factor in an average 8 hours of sleep and that leaves me with 3 hours in which to do things like play games, eat food, etc.

It seems common lately, but this is a pretty weird notion; that life is all about having fun after work, and work is just a waste of time. Work IS the majority of your time. It's what YOU do --- YOUR job; YOUR career; YOUR chosen way to exist. It should be something that's meaningful to you -- something you care about and believe in. Either find a way to enjoy it (by enjoying the technical challenge of a high-end IT job, or the service to others that waiting tables involves, for instance) or get/invent a new job that you DO give a shit about. Otherwise, you're a) doomed to a hateful existence; and b) essentially whoring your life away for the sake of money from someone you don't like.

Hell, if you want to spend your time playing games, just quit the job, live off social security, and play games. Why lie about who you are? But if you want your time to be meaningful and your job to be rewarding, then pick a meaningful job that you're capable of feeling the rewards from.

Re:I hate time sinks

[wisty]

This has been threshed out on Slashdot ad nauseum.

a) The Grind makes more money, because MMOs are time based.

b) The Grind makes them more addictive. You can't stop playing, because you "invested" 1000 hours already.

c) The Grind gives you a false sense of achievement, just like poker machines do. You like they way it feels like "work", but nobody ever criticizes you for doing it badly. If you were to spend the time learning a skill, or making money, there would be a much greater chance of failure. The Grind is an effective substitute for real life.

Re:I hate time sinks

[cpricejones]

I agree with this: in practice they can become very addicting. Take Morrowind or Oblivion, both fantastic games that are single player. Both are time sinks, depending on how you look at it. Many people played them, so there were enough people to talk about the game to make it massive single player.

Probably the best example of what you want is Nethack. The game does not take much time but is very, very frustrating for the beginning player. Sometimes it is so damn frustrating you cannot play for more than a half hour. Several people I know play the game, and when we play at the same time on a server like NAO, it's a similarly nice experience. You can take a break from the frustration and watch others play, etc.

I think the trick here is not being attached to the character because in Nethack their life is most likely going to end soon (unless you are good of course), and you will start from the beginning. So it's not as much of a time sink either. The replay value is much better than most games, too, because the world is randomly generated. Now if that sort of idea could be put into a modern game, where everything is randomly generated, then the game might be on to something. However, many people would find that type of game too hard, I think.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Most work sucks in reality that's why they call it work and not play this is reality get used to it. The number of people that actually have fun interesting jobs are relatively few. You doubt this, really look at peoples faces at street lights and intersection on your next commute to work to a man and woman they all look miserable. Not to be too much of a downer but modern life is for most people is a daily drudgery. Why else would so many be on anti depressants? I would settle for my work being meaningful and yet I don't even get that.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Rich0]

It's interesting how you totally filtered out the part I wrote about enjoying menial jobs as a service to humanity.

Nope - I read it clearly. You're welcome to stop by and mow my lawn as a service to humanity anytime you'd like. Actually, I extend that offer to everybody. And yet, for some odd reason, I still find myself mowing my lawn.

My point is that what you're saying sounds nice and all, but nobody in the real world would actually live that way.

Re:I hate time sinks

[dmbasso]

Oh, come on mods, even though it was AC's, it was funny.

Re:I hate time sinks

[MorePower]

The main problem is this. There is nothing that I enjoy doing 40+ hours per week. And the really big problem is that even things I do enjoy doing, I hate doing to someone else's schedule. I really like building things with LEGO, for example, so should I go apply for a job at LEGOLAND (as if I would really get such a coveted job)? I bet I would hate it just as much as my current job, because I'm not always in the mood to build things with LEGO, starting at 8:00am and ending at 5:00pm (or whatever hours LEGOLAND builders work).

And that's the thing about jobs, someone else is relying on your output. So you need to adjust to their wants and needs. And that's the part that sucks.

Also, there is no way to "quit your job, live off social security..." Social Security only pays out when you reach retirement age (and you notice, most people do quit as soon as they are eligible for retirement benefits). Welfare is what you would get as a working age person, and unless you have dependent kids they cut you off after 5 years (cumulative for your lifetime) and leave you to starve to death.

And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[AlmondMan]

Killing it through making everything into solo-content, losing out on all the things that the genre would've allowed for. All the many possibilities of player vs player conflict are swept under the rug and turned into endless killing grounds, like the instanced battle arenas in Anarchy Online, WAR and WoW. WAR is a bit on the right track again, with the world being sort of dynamic between the two sides, but things are just going way too fast back and forth. And the world is too stiff.

The idea of players working together, cooperating and prospering in these digital worlds has been lost and we're back in the ego race for the most epeen. Which is sad, because the fun of these games lies in the multiplayer cooperative part. Which was their great attraction piece in times past. Now, it's just a really bad singleplayer game. Consider, if you will, playing any of the many MMOs in an offline game. Everything works exactly the same as the MMO, only you're quite alone. Nothing you do will ever have an impact on the world as it does in proper singleplayer games. The story progresses and things change around your character. In MMOs the best thing you can do is fake this, like they've started doing in WoW, which I find to be just cheap, with the only purpose of it being to greater satisfy the solo player. Leaving nothing in the way of multiplayer ways to see change going on in the world. Sad.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[centuren]

You can't start anew in an "old" MMO that relied on group play, because everyone is already far above your level and unwilling to go back to level yet another toon, and, well, being a group-heavy game you won't get far alone.

I agree that there are major problems starting anew in an MMO that requires group play, but for a slightly different reason: once an end-game player, always an end-game player.

I realise this won't apply to everyone, but after I passed the point in WoW where I had spent more time at maximum level than I had all other levels combined, a huge part of the game was spoiled for me.

If I wanted to start a new character to say, play with other friends on a PVP server, the first 69 (and later 79) levels were just blown through. The first time I played it, those levels were fun, and meaningful. I remember the first time a friend had a character in the 20s, and how high that seemed. The impossibility of getting one's first mount, the difficulty of low level dungeons, the excitement of training a new ability.

Those experiences all evaporated, and levelling an alt meant mailing hundreds of gold, 16 slot bags, and getting raid geared guildmates to run through all the instances farming drops and checking off group quests. Any efforts I made to band our alts together and spend time doing the early dungeons the proper way fell through, because it was just too hard to drop the end-game focus.

When 79 out of 80 levels are time that just needs to be pushed through and done with in order for the real grind to start, I think the game loses a lot. As WoW has changed to entice a larger user-base, I think the design has encouraged this more and more for those that enjoy the end-game content. Worse of all, when you've had that mindset enough, it easily transfers to other MMORPG's of similar design.

This is why I quit WoW

[maudface]

I started to realise that I actively hated having to group with other people to the point that I'd obnoxiously subject prospective party members to simple logic tests to find out whether they were functionally mentally disabled or not. I'd just avoid any sort of quest that would require me to interact with other people, at the time realms were closed off so the actual real live friends of mine were invariably on other realms or completely inappropriate levels to quest with me. Where does it get sane to pay a monthly fee for the ability to avoid playing with others online? If I wanted that I'd actually bother to pay for an xbox live gold subscription, at least with that I can still play the damn games instead of having their content entirely withdrawn from me despite having paid for it.

That's not why

[Dachannien]

When I play games like Guild Wars solo, it's not because "I want to be the hero" or because "I want all the lewts". It's because pick-up groups suck. You spend half an hour trying to round up people to fill out the group, and it only takes one of them being a moron to ruin the entire experience.

For those few of you who don't know, that's the guy who doesn't know how to get where you're going, can't properly follow your directions to get there, tries to boss around the party when he finally does get there even though he clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and then fifteen minutes into the group says, "o man i have 2 go.. mom wants me 2 clean my room".

Re:That's not why

[RedK]

Yes, you do need 1 guy to tank and 1 guy to heal. There's 4 class for each of those roles, so I'd say that doesn't make for very strict group configurations. But that's besides the point, I was saying some people think it requires certain classes for certain instances, when it's patently false. Take for example Heroic Blood furnace. People used to say you need a Warlock for banishes in there, while we just did it numerous times with numerous different classes and often times without a Warlock in sight. Heck, I used to kite the demons before the last boss as a Paladin with just high aggro and other people slowing them down (rogues/hunters/mages or even myself with the daze). But I've been thrown out of pugs (as a tank too..) for even mentionning "Let's get that mage and go, we won't find a stupid warlock and we don't need it". Of course, 45 minutes later, the instance was cleared for my new group and the old group was still looking for a Warlock.

The difference is between the sheep who can't do anything if it's not written on a web page, and people that actually can play. There's no such thing as a strict group make up, only idiots who say it does because Wowhead told them so.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Antidamage]

On behalf of most of slashdot, I only wish I had a real life to put before games.

It's the D-Bags...

[MogNuts]

It's because of the d-bags. We love the idea of all the new content, ever-changing worlds, new quests, new gear, or trading for awesome gear you can't normally get at your level. Then we play with people and remember that it's still the same thing as playing with online as it ever was--awful. D-bags, cheaters, impatient people, and all the other awful people online. Just think, the same trolls and flamebaiters and morons who post random comments on forums/articles (excluding /.; those people make ./ trolls look like saints) are the same people you'll be playing with on an MMO.

Hence the single-player MMO--providing all the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[hibiki_r]

I completely agree.

I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.

The effect of price on behavior was very obvious. I can think of two possibilities: Either a high price enforces "good behavior" because no one wants to waste money acting like an idiot, but people are willing to act like idiots when something is free; or as an "elitist snob" (yeah yeah, think whatever you want) I tend to favor the idea that people with more money tend to be better educated (with few exceptions) and mannered, and so an expensive, exclusive "club" will have less "trash".

It doesn't have to be free: Xbox Live is choke full of imbeciles, and people pay for the privilege of having to play with them.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to define casual:

It's a socially awkward player who is afraid that people in a guild would find out on teamspeak or vent that the hotavnger21 female night elf warrior with HUGE boobs is in fact John Conner, male, aged 43 living in a trailer and has only the huge boobs in common with his character.

"Your Multiplayer Experience May Vary"

[pwilli]

Therefore, I chose to do all "challenges" in WoW by myself, wherever possible. The moment I couldn't do stuff on my own/finding a (working) group to do it would always take more than 1 hour, I quit. I am definetly not the "I need to be THE hero" type of player, therefore the timesinks in WoW ("Hey everybody, look at my super-duper 1000 hours worth of playtime pet, I'm awesome!") and other MMOs don't work for me either.

A single player WoW with bots would've been awesome.

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[NightRain]

What richness and depth? MMOs have sheer size, but any richness and depth they have comes from the fact you're dealing with other human beings. Remove them, and they are invariably suffer in comparison to a dedicated single player game from the same genre

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[RobotRunAmok]

Eve also suffers hugely for it

Eve doesn't suffer for it. The solo player -- playing in the game designed for a multi-player experience -- who feels he is entitled to access content designed for groups, may "suffer," but the game surely does not. Empire space is huge, and soloists can stay there pretty much with no danger. That's Eve's solo game, and it's big, and it's bigger than the "solo games" of most MMOs. If you want to play Eve, but don't want to group, your game is in Empire. If you come to the field with a baseball, and everyone else is playing football, you don't expect everyone else to accommodate you simply because you brought a baseball to a football game. These are online multi-player games. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that you need a group to experience them the way the developers intended.

Eve is just more elegant about the way it handles the solo/multiplayer dichotomy than other games. In other MMOs, when you try to access the phat lewts beyond the mountain pass, you'll be informed that there aren't enough people in your group, you need a raid-force, whatever. Eve just lets you go where you want and pay the consequences if you enter Dodge City as a Lone Gunman.

By the way, I read an article in Eon magazine about a solo player who did travel to every system in Eve, taking screengrabs along the way. It was not easy, it was an adventure, but he was good and he did it. So buy a fast, cloaked ship, skill up, and start exploring!

Personally, Hell yeah!

[lindseyp]

I don't spend so much time gaming. But having wasted a good many hundreds of hours on MUD's back in the day. I can say the one thing I found inherently unattractive about the recent flavour of MMORPGs was the fact that you had to go find friends, become part of a guild or team, and work through all those stupid politics and social chores just to be able to play.

I don't necessarily want to make friends. I just want to play. What I *Love* about multi-player games is the fact that you meet real people along the way, and have the *opportunity* to befriend or interact if you so choose. What I don't want in my escapism is some social obligation to go through the same bulsh*t with people to "get my game done" as I have to at work to "get my job done".

Article misses the mark

[Synn]

Players didn't get sick of group play, they got tired of having to wait 30 mins to an hour for the proper group to form just so they could play the game. Then you'd get an hour into a dungeon only to have the cleric leave and you'd have to exit and sit around waiting for another cleric to show up, because you couldn't play the game without one.

What's all this QQ about?

[Kreigaffe]

Simply put, people are a waste of time.

Let's go back to two games I played and HATED because of the forced-grouping. EQ and DAOC. EQ was *terrible* about requiring a group to do... anything. Except for certain classes. DAOC was the same way. In both cases, the intention was always to force people to group up to do pretty much anything at all. Hell, even just getting from Point A to Point B was often dangerous alone.

It's just not fun. Period, end of story.

To build an MMO like that, you're assuming there will be an equal distribution of the classes required to do anything. You're assuming there will be as much tanks and dps as healers. That's.. not true, at all. Never happens. And nobody wants to spend their limited time in-game sitting around waiting for people to show up so MAYBE they can go push a single button over and over and gain a half a level. Spend 2 hours looking for a group, and 1 hour actually grouping? It's just not fun any way you slice it.

Forced grouping works GREAT in certain games, and certain aspects of games. Look at D&D. You KNOW when you're playing D&D that you'll have a group with you, because if you don't.. you're not playing. You don't decide to play and then sit around your table waiting for random people to walk by and ask them if they happen to be the class you need in your group. That happened in EQ and DAOC constantly. It's dumb. In WoW, end-game raids are generally scheduled, and even those that aren't? They're at least end-game, where the majority of your player base will wind up, so at least there's a wide pool of people to draw on. Even that wasn't enough, though, so WoW has added tons of tools to help people find other people to group with for end-game content, and of the 3 archtypes -- tank, dps, heal -- most classes can handle at least two of those jobs, and with dual specs it's really, really simple. And honestly, it still kinda sucks. A few people don't show up to a scheduled raid, you have to spend time looking for fill-ins. PUGs don't always even get off the ground.

Basically, forced-grouping in MMOs fails because people don't like sitting on their ass typing "LFG" over and over and over when they're *supposed* to be playing a game and having fun. Once you add all the retards into the equation, you wind up spending too much time typing "LFG" and once you're done with that, it's probably 50/50 odds that you'll have to start doing it again shortly because whoever you find will be too stupid to group with.

Honestly WAR handled it pretty well, at least up until level 30 or so (when I quit..). Solo you'd be fine 99% of the time, but each time you added to your group you became more and more effective. WoW group play compared to solo I often found to actually slow me down, even with guildies on vent, but WAR it really always payed off but never was necessary. Really a shame they got so much wrong with that game, because they did get a lot right.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[centuren]

Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.

I only just started Eve's free trial, and so far, it's felt like a well-polished single player game. A friend or two will join me soon, and I'll see what that's like.

I disagree with your example, though. Exploring around the universe might require a battlefleet, but wouldn't it be overtly artificial if it didn't? My empire is at war with other powers, and powerful pirates roam the lesser controlled areas (or so I'm imagining, it's all still new to me).

The point is, I don't see myself entitled to exploring everywhere in the Eve universe. I don't feel it conflicts with my solo play, so long as I have other things that I can do. Having areas dominated by fleets that will destroy me adds an element to the game. Perhaps that was your point, also, except that I've yet to see how it suffers hugely (I know there are a lot of complaints about Eve, but I've chosen to not listen to them so far).

Most likely I'm too new to the game to really make any comments on it, but having played a few single player space games (Homeworld, Sword of the Stars, etc), my limited experience with Eve so far is that I like the solo play a lot more than those single player games. Since it's designed to be able to interact with thousands of other players with ships, things that were a pain in the other games are simplified, and I feel like I'm being immersed in a sci-fi setting, not a sci-fi story (from which I can't escape). That's a requirement for the MMO side, and perhaps the big appeal so far.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[fractoid]

8 hours a week is hardcore? Maybe for Tetris or Wii Bowling. 'Casual' MMO players can play anywhere up to 30 hours a week, I don't believe it's possible to play an MMO game at a 'hardcore' level if you have either a job or a partner.