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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."
I virtually never play multiplayer online (I'll play multiplayer console games with friends, but virtually never with random people). Why? Two reasons. First, multiplayer is horribly repetitive and lacks originality. Secondly, when doing random matches online, the overwhelming majority of people are total asshats (see John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) that completely ruin any fun.
Companies need to focus on having original gameplay and an involving story that keeps you wanting to play, not just repetitive multiplayer.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
The two Super Mario Galaxy games have this "sidekick" feature that lets your little brother have fun while you're playing. You achieve all the tough stuff in the level, while any toddler who wants to sit next to you can wave the wand and collect extra stars that may help you out in some way. I'd love to see more games have a sidekick feature, or a mode which is way easier and open-ended than the beat-a-boss-find-a-bigger-boss treadmill. Say, for each major area in the game, just let somebody putz around and explore, push buttons, be congratulated for finding stuff and reset things so they can "find" them again and again. We don't all start out as an obsessed 14-year-old ready to frag everybody in sight.
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I exclusively play multiplayer games, except on my phone when I want a quick game of Vexed or something to pass the time. Other than that, single player games are a little sad, and never as challenging as multiplayer. The way single player games are made challenging are to have bad guys with more strength/weapons/power than you, and/or cheating. Whereas QuakeLive is as good as the guys you're playing against, and given that it's full of clan players and people who've been playing quake for perhaps longer than they should have, it means that you're competing on level ground when it comes to player specs/weapons, but against people who know every last trick available (which you can learn should you be arsed). Who wants to play quakelive against bots? What would be the point?
You're only thinking of a very narrow subset of games.
Was Myst made more challenging by giving the bad guys more strength/weapons/power than the player? What about The Path? Or Braid? Or Portal?
Lots of games challenge players in different ways - challenge them to think through a situation, rather than relying on quick reflexes or memorizing a map's layout.
But I think you're missing the broader picture... A single-player game does not need to be challenging to be fun. It doesn't actually have to be hard to complete. A single-player game can present an interesting storyline in ways that a multi-player game cannot (or, at least, has not yet).
In a single-player game you can develop characters and settings. You can explore a world. You can show the consequences of your actions. You can have a whole story arc.
A multi-player game is generally about pure competition. Beat the other guy. Score more kills. Get more points.
It's kind of like comparing football to a novel.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
For me, multiplayer games require time to learn to be functional in it. Maybe too much time. Time to learn the maps, the strats, to not be a noob. It's not fun to be frag meat.
With all the extra time I put in these days at work, not to mention stress, my gaming time is more limited.
I prefer single player more now. Single player means just moving along at my own pace. No pressure, no matches, no expectations.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
I go for single-player games. For me, gaming is about escapism -- and the story / plot. This is why I love playing Oblivion but won't touch WoW or other MMORPGs. Sartre said it best: "L'enfer, c'est les autres." ("Hell is other people.")
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I disagree. A lot of RPG's have had extremely successful single-player campaigns, but the graphics were not all that great, even when the game first came out ... and many continue replaying it. Why? Not graphics or challenge, but story. "Hey, what happens to the story if I do it this way instead" or "use this character" or "how does this class follow the story path" ... etc.
Or, say, Oblivion. Not a hard game. Not amazing graphics (at least, anymore), but generically nice. Not multiplayer at all. It was pretty successful. It had a more or less simple and somewhat interesting main storyline, but what made it fun was the rather free world it presented.
Your example of "Tom Clancy: Press A" with moving dialogues (basically, a book) is a bit oversimplified. When the GP was talking about "story," I'm pretty sure he's talking about story interaction, not just the flat linear telling of a story. It's the placing of the game player into the story that people like, not simply being told the story itself. It's BEING the protagonist - or someone in the story, anyways - that's fun.
Just like actually controlling the exploration of a world is a lot different than having a guided tour of the world. Who would want a guided tour of Oblivion, a hands-off experience? That'd be boring.
Many non-RPG games appear to be putting RPG elements in, as well. FPS's with a lot of storyline (e.g., Half-Life). FPS's with characters gaining levels/experience ("Action-RPG"). Heavy story RTS games with small "experience"-based leveling type things, such as World in Conflict.
Go play nethack and get back to me. Yeah, that horde of 'q' is stronger than you are. But who's smarter? (judging from your post, I'm betting on the 'q' actually)
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Most of the responses so far have equated multiplayer with death-match style gameplay. What people seem to be neglecting is coop campaign style multiplayer. I don't much care for death-match with random online players, but instead it's fun to get together with friends to play through story mode. This is what I would like to see more of in upcoming games.
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.
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
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