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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."
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.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
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".
On behalf of most of slashdot, I only wish I had a real life to put before games.
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.
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!
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.
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.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.