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Single-Player Game Model 'Finished,' Says EA Exec
Frank Gibeau, label president for EA Games, recently spoke with Develop about the publisher's long term development strategy. Gibeau thinks developing major games without multiplayer modes is a passing fad:
"...it’s not only about multiplayer, it’s about being connected. I firmly believe that the way the products we have are going, they need to be connected online. ... I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished. Online is where the innovation and the action [are] at."
Well, I think he's full of shit. Some of the best games I've ever played are single-player. Golden Sun for GBA, Bioshock 1, the Elder Scrolls series, Persona 3, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the Penumbra series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 (despite 2's.. er... lack of polish), the Final Fantasy series... Come to think of it, Fallout: New Vegas' sales numbers prove this crap wrong. It's a perfect example of a modern single player game that garnered huge sales. Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age also had great sales as single player games, though I can't say whether they were good or not since I haven't played them.
My guess is that EA would rather pump out the same big name game over and over. Guaranteed profits, no risk, and virtually no money spent on developing the hard things like a good plot or character depth. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite games are multiplayer (hell, the Battlefield series is one of my favorite series as well, been a fan since BF1942, and don't get me started on Valve games), but by no means is single player a dead genre.
They clearly understand jack about a gamer's heart and what makes a game great, but they hope to get their business-goals accepted by trying to sound all visionary-like.
Alas, nobody with experience in gaming will be able to take them seriously.
EA's true goals:
These profit-driven bastard won't spend a second thinking about what makes a game great, because they don't know jack about games. I spit in their face.
The future lies with indie-games and Nintendo
It's not that single-player is dead. It's that offline is dead (or dying). Which is, and I say this as a predominantly single-player game enthusiast, basically okay. Right now I'm playing two games pretty regularly, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Joe Danger, which both have well integrated leaderboards. But they don't just pit you against millions of random people across the globe. They actually pit you against people on your friends lists.
So when I boot up NFS and get ready to tick off another event on that big map I instead skip over to the Autolog and see what my friends have been up to lately. I then spend the next hour and a half trying to beat their times and reclaim my top spot on the wall. So for a game where I would normally run straight through trying merely to complete every event and reach 100% completion, I'm now basically wasting time re-racing events competitively against my friends list. And you know what? I'm loving it. I think this is actually the best way to enhance replayability that I've seen in a long time. And it's not like leaderboards are anything new in games, far from it. But that connectedness is really addicting. I've yet to play one multi-player event. I will at some point but I'm still having fun with the single-player. Fun that indeed benefits from the connected, social features they've weaved into the game.
And yea I'm not a Facebook guy but from what I understand this is a pretty common thread among Facebook games as well. It's an interesting way to game.
If a game is designed to be played single player, then it shouldn't have multiplayer tacked on; I agree with you there. (PopCap casual games are a perfect example of that. They make all their money selling simple, single-player games and are very profitable.) But if the game is ever going to have a multiplayer aspect to it, the developers need to first balance the multiplayer aspect and build the single player after multiplayer is finished. Not only does this ensure that multiplayer modes are enjoyable (because it's evenly balanced) but also provides a way to drop a beta test without giving away the single player aspect. (One of the more well-known developers that seems to work this way is Blizzard. Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 betas were multiplayer only, campaigns came out with full-game and were still an enjoyable single-player experience. Even after campaign is played through, multiplayer is still fun.)
The problem is that so many games are designed and developed in single-player and then a multiplayer addition is hacked on at the end. This often results in strange bugs for multiplayer and countless exploits, not to mention character/weapon/whatever imbalance and overall just shitty experience in the game online as a whole.
Each to its own indeed. I'm generally more of a fantasy-person, but I found Fallout 3 very very impressive. For a few hours. Then I caught myself actually being being influenced by the ingame atmosphere to the point were I was almost downright depressed. I suspect this is kind of the intention, and I would never describe Fallout 3 as bad. On the contrary, I think it's *too* good.
Red Dead Redemption had that problem- no ranking at all. You go in at level 1 riding a nag and armed with some dinky weapon loadout, and a level 50 guy with a golden gun riding a golden buffalo that runs at about Mach 3 keeps killing you. Whee. Always wondered what the fun was from the level 50 guy's POV. It seems it would be like playing a game with a God code activated. It would get boring after 5 minutes.
And you have to be a fanatic to even get to level 50. I got to level 36 and was burned out on it completely. I think the golden buffalo is for reaching 50, passing into legend, and going from 1 to 50 *again*! Crap, I'm just not that OCD.
Co-op is the real king in my book, especially games like Borderlands where you can play the same thing single or in co-op, and the game adjusts the difficulty based on how many people are in the group. I played that both ways, and it was great.
Portal 2 looks like the next great co-op. In that case it looks like added levels designed specifically for two players.
Bingo! Give that man a ceeegar! I quit playing multiplayer years ago thanks to 'nigger nigger faggot faggot' crap and the final straw was having to spend more time dealing with my routers and my ISP thanks to some little snot griefer that decided to DDOS me because I actually stomped his ass in MechWarrior 4. Every few years I'll fire up one of my recent purchases that has multiplayer to see if they have ever fixed the bullshit, and what do I get? Foul mouthed teens, griefers, and aimbots, not to mention the total psychos that have made game X their entire existence. You kill one of those and he'll "suicide bomber" you every time you get on, and continue until you quit.
I have nearly 3 dozen games installed on my system right now from Bioshock II going back to No One Lives Forever 1. How many do I play multiplayer? ZERO. I usually buy myself at least a game or two every month, how many of those are multiplayer only? ZERO. Last one I got was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars given to me by a clueless relative. I played it a whole 30 minutes and then stuffed it in a closet.
Say what you want about MSFT but one of the nice things about Windows is thanks to backwards compatibility there are literally thousands of single player titles out there I have yet to own and play. If EA or any of these other publishers want to be morons and spend millions on arena for cussing kids? Well I can just shop Good Old Games until they come to their senses or die out to be replaced by publishers with a brain. Lets be honest folks: Most of these companies idea of "multiplayer" is the same old DM and CTF bullshit we've seen for over a decade, and which appeals only to foul mouthed kids from what I've seen. If that is the future of gaming? They can keep it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.