Too Much Multiplayer In Today's Games?

hornedrat writes "Gamepro discusses the idea that modern games put too much emphasis on multiplayer, and that players aren't as concerned about it as developers think. 'The current environment encourages developers to unnecessarily toss multiplayer into their games without caring about it — or even considering whether anyone will bother playing it. It’s like they're checking an invisible quota box that demands multiplayer's inclusion.' Personally I agree that too much emphasis is placed on competitive multiplayer. I play online, but only with my brother in games that allow co-operative modes, like Rainbow Six: Vegas and ARMA 2. 'My point isn't that developers shouldn't try and conquer Halo or Call of Duty. We'd never have any progress in this industry if developers didn't compete. Game companies, however, should think carefully about what they want their games to be, and more important, gamers should consider what they want. If a developer wants to eclipse Halo, then by all means, pour that effort into a multiplayer mode that's different.' I would be interested to know how many gamers really care about the multiplayer components of the games they buy."

Comments

I gravitate toward multiplayer nowadays

[Jay Tarbox]

I no longer enjoy playing against 1's and 0's once I've played against humans. It's much more challenging and satisfying as well. Nothing beats making a headshot across the map and just KNOWING that someone is pissed off. When hit by said shot, I'm both pissed and admiring the shot as well.

Not sure where you got that idea

[Moraelin]

I'm not sure where you got any of those ideas actually.

1. While graphics are a big selling point and much talked about, if it were the only one, there'd be no need to get an RPG instead of, dunno, just about anything else. Like an old-school mindless FPS where the whole plot is "kill everyone on the map."

Even for non-RPGs, ever heard of a game called Half Life? Yeah, that's around where having a story started to matter even in FPS.

That the graphics get the most hype is also an issue of it being the easiest to talk about without playing for more than an hour or two, which is what the average reviewer seems to do. Plus you can put a lot of screenshots on a review site, while discussing plot elements is actually frowned upon.

2. Speaking of which: if the story didn't matter, then why are spoilers frowned upon?

3. I'm pretty sure that the expansion of the games market in the last two decades straight was mainly due to making games increasingly _less_ challenging. From such stuff as Max Payne's decreasing the difficulty ever more without even asking if you die too much, to WoW basically increasing the MMO market size by an order of magnitude by being less challenging than any other MMO out there, to RPGs with scaled enemies so you don't end up with challenges above your level, to racing games with rubberband mechanics where essentially everyone drives around your position so you can still win even if you bounce in all the walls, etc, the history of the last decade can be summed up as basically "how can we make our games accessible to everyone short of a paraplegic and not challenge them much?"

The age of the die-hard nerds playing just to prove they can win against stupid odds in a game, has come and gone. It was an age where markets were measured in thousands of units sold, and selling 10,000 copies would make you a cult classic. The mass market just isn't there and never was.

But, heck, even way back, Lucas Arts was more popular than Sierra because their adventures didn't kill your character and make you reload for every mistake, nor let you do something that will make it impossible to win the game later. Lucas adventures literally let you try everything everywhere, with _zero_ repercussions for doing something wrong. So, why did people buy those if everyone wants a challenge?

4. As someone who dabbled into modding, I'm pretty sure that there's a huge number of people out there who'll explicitly look for basically god-mode items. That's not people playing for a challenge, that's people who basically just want to bonk that big-ass dragon on the head _once_ and move on to the next bit of the story. Basically, yes, they just want a "Press A to continue" instead of the whole challenge.

Plus, in the same vein, there's the issue of the thousands of sites dedicated to cheats, or the fact that on consoles there's actually money to be made by selling cheat programs like GameShark, Exploder, and whatever it is they use these days. Or save games that include every item in the game and a hacked character with all skills and 1,000,000 health. Roll that around in your head. There are people willing to actually pay extra money to remove the challenge, and there always were enough to support several vendors on any given console.

5. But to get back to story, funnily enough, your argument sounds to me like a rehash of Nintendo's arguments back in the N64 vs Playstation days. Nintendo was still The Big N, and when everyone who wanted to pack elaborate stories and FMV scenes (not to mention Nintendo's asshole attitude and delusions of being some kind of dictator back in those days) fled to Playstation and it's cheap CDs, Nintendo basically went on to give lots of speeches saying the same: story doesn't matter, people don't want RPGs, some kind of platformer is what everyone plays because gameplay is the only thing that matters. It even went for insulting statements like that those who play RPGs are just a handful of depressed people playing in a dark basement. Yeah, ask them how