Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional jerks, I can just do things in the real world. Single-player gaming is more comfy.
My wife uses video games to relax and de-stress after having dealt with customers all day. Having to deal with more people in the evening is the last thing she needs.
You can always solo queue fortnight/apex or whatever. The worst case is you die cause you had to deal with the kid/cat/work call, if you focus on the fun of the individual engagements and don't worry about actually winning the match you'll have fun. I do understand what you're saying, multiplayer gaming does require much more intentionality. You have to make distraction free time to get the most out of it, especially if you're playing a team game there's a social contract to have the time to play the match out.
Not my experience. You are right that it's less of an issue. But I very definitely stressed about individual matches and how it affects the ranking and stats. You hold it in until the match finishes and just don't join the next one right away but you still change your behavior. Or in something like WoW PvP servers you go somewhere safe before logging out etc.
What I dislike is how much more uncommon random matchups are. I find ranked stressful because it incentivizes making the number go up, so I prefer to be an eternal Quick Play player. But a lot of QP systems still use shadow rankings that influence who you get paired with, and they tend to give me very ping-pong results.
One game I'm dominating against the other team, but then the ball hits the other side and get paired with people above my level for the next several. It kinda makes me feel like the agency on how well I can perform is taken away from me, and I just have to hope the matchmaking system takes pity.
At least when matches were more random, sometimes I'd get paired with people above my level, but it was rare that it felt completely rigged against me.
This is the big one to me, time commitment. People spend hours on these, and if you want to "hang" with an in-group, they expect you to put in the time. No thanks. I don't want a lifestyle revolving around maximizing time on a multiplayer game.
If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
It's not just jerks. Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them. Then you have lag, solo team pitted against organized teams, ranking systems that arent accurate, etc.
Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair.
But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.
I played League of Legends and didn’t have any problem with the monetization scheme because you could get a great selection of characters to play paying no money (could have played the starter Sona forever) or a modest amount of money.
What did bother me was (1) games taking too long (I don’t want to tell my family I can’t help with anything for 45 minutes) and (2) jerks. In ranked there were the people who thought they could not get ahead because the players they played with (me) sucked, in unranked there were too many people who couldn’t queue successfully (learned how to play all positions, even jungle, so I wouldn’t be part of the problem of having three people who want to play top)
Anecdotally (n.b. i have like 20x the time in dota vs league) I find the matchmaker in dota does a much better job of taking your behavior metrics into account. If you're nice you'll get nice people in your games. I think it's not uncommon for the 9 other people in the game to be willing to hold a pause for a few minutes if you need to deal with an emergency.
Pay-to-win mechanics used to always mean a game was not taken seriously competitively. Now with several genres of game it's expected you will pay money to unlock "DLC" characters (e.g. Street Fighter) that you can't otherwise play, but need to play against. It's not exactly pay-to-win since the locked characters are supposed to be fairly balanced, but it's arguable since balance is never perfect and developers seem reluctant to err on the weak side for characters they're trying to sell for a profit.
there are established good competitive titles without pay2win. look at league, counter-strike for instance.
a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear.
this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
Depends on the market, pay2win is rare in western-developed PC and console games but extremely common in eastern-developed games, and mobile games developed anywhere. Korean MMOs are infamous for being pay2win pretty much without exception. Not that I think western publishers would be above doing P2W if they thought they could get away with it, but their main target markets aren't primed to accept it, though that tide is shifting with the rising global popularity of gacha games.
My god, this. In ut99 we found, in the assault mazon fortress map, how attackers could shoot friends on top of the fortress roof from the starting point. It broke the map completely, but nobody cared. In fact, it was so cool, the defenders joined the attackers, landing on top of their own base.
So you can essentially skip half your character's progression arc by entering a credit card number.
Now, you can argue that the best gear is BOP (Bind on Pickup) so this isn't a huge factor, but there's still definitely an aspect of "pay to win", since there are plenty of other things you need gold for that payment skips.
You can also argue that WoW isn't competitive, but all multiplayer games have a light competition of being ahead of others in progression, even if it's not direct competition. (I'm ignoring PvP because actual PvP is a tiny minority interest. )
This description of the pay to win properties of WoW is slightly dated. Gold buys you very little in the way of gear these days. They have de-emphasized the role of gold over time because players kept buying it.
That didn't stop players from figuring out how to pay to win though. They now pay "boosting" and "carry" services - other people who group up with you and then clear dungeons while you just follow along behind them and collect the loot as it drops.
There are advertisers spamming ads for these carry services all over the place inside the game even though they're against ToS. It does still have its charms but on balance WoW really has become a train wreck.
This shows up in fighting games, where DLC (i.e. paid) characters often have increasingly overpowered properties or even entirely new mechanics that the rest of the cast struggles to deal with.
That's only 1/3rd of that list. Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree. If you see my previous comment, it specifies "pay for advantage". Some games you have to pay to unlock gear or xp boosters to make it really playable.
> Some games you have to pay to unlock gear or xp boosters to make it really playable.
Again, can you provide an example? Also
> Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree
Is just blatantly incorrect, unless you just mean "One player is further in the game than the other", in which case literally all games are "competitive", including single player.
I still (very) occasionally play WoW, and that's pretty much the only game I ever play.
I'd love to try a new MMO, but they're all "free-to-play" meaning "pay to win". I just want to pay a normal monthly subscription price and explore cool worlds. Maybe interact occasionally with some other people in a guild or pickup group or something.
It's what keeps my WoW subscription active, even though I rarely play it.
Sadly, it's gotten so bad that I spend most of my brain-dead time reading Lit RPG stuff, because at least with that I can recapture some of the sense of wonder and excitement that we had during the golden age of MMOs (UO, EQ, DAOC, AC, SWG, etc...).
You could try Final Fantasy XIV—it's a traditional regular-subscription MMO that's actually picked up a lot of users in recent years. It's much more story-focused than WoW, which is a turn-off to a lot of people coming from that tradition, but it's got a free trial.
There are some which are more casual. My partner plays fornite. She's got a group she games with, and half the talking is about the game the other half is basically a catch up session with a game in the background.
there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar.
Elden Ring has an interesting multiplayer mechanic, and it works quite well.
1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc.
2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps.
3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited.
4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game.
5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player.
6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader.
I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
Multiplayer has also been taken over by free2play skinner box design, so if you want games that aren't designed to waste your time with unfun but addictive gameplay loops and/or nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.
I feel like multiplayer gaming was more fun/popular when there were more jerks, especially on the mics. It seemed like half the fun was the shit talking back in the halo 3/cod 4 era, and it really only stopped when they screwed up how lobbies worked in newer titles where you can't go on all talk between games let alone actually party up, or have proxy chat in game. At least on some PC games you can still get on the mics and PC gamers do actually still use their mics. I'm not sure if the new consoles even ship with mics anymore.
So I think there are two things here. First I agree somewhat though I think that there's a difference between good natured shit talking and being a jerk. I feel like as a kid people still could be mean but tonally it was more jovial, now I feel like I run into more miserable assholes (which I think is much worse). Secondly it still wasn't fun for everyone back in the day, especially if you were different people would try to bully you. I never had an issue but I know a lot of people who have never used public voice chat because they don't want to be harassed.
now you have people getting pissed off by "nice save!" messages used ironically in rocket league, or people getting riled up from a random goal celebration in the popular annual football game.
people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
Shit talking or hearing others shit talk was half the fun. IMO, this should be resolved through the creation of moderated vs unmoderated channels. Different strokes for different folks. Instead, all channels are moderated.
I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant.
Heh. If we're using competitiveness as a measuring stick, Helldivers 2 is absolutely competitive. If you're not geared up with the current meta, you're frequently flamed and kicked. There's a lot of "win or die" mentality there.
If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
Competitiveness and zero sum thinking is so bad in the world of video games, that Helldivers 2's entire run has been marred by over-balancing loadouts in an explicitly coop, PvE game, where balance shouldn't even be a priority.
They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE
ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count.
This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency.
So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika.
They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update.
Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
Helldivers 2 over-tuned because they wanted to keep things in the difficulty levels they envisioned, and people were simply vocal because they wanted a power fantasy. Space Marines 2 delivered on that desire better than Helldivers 2 did.
I don't think I've ever seen a game company ever manage to put 100% of their changes in a CHANGELOG.
FromSoftware games like to put in cheese border-line bullshit mechanics to make you feel good when you overcome them, even if you have to cheese them yourself. They knew everybody was going to cheese regardless of the difficulty they just made a round-about way of making you feel like it was okay.
Some people like competitiveness in games, and like difficult games, and thats okay if you do or don't. Games need to find a product-market fit just like anything else.
Part of this goes back to skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) systems becoming the standard. It used to be I would just play Counter-Strike on a local server because it had the best ping, by far. The same people were playing there all the time, so there was a sense of community, and I could really see myself improve over time in the stats and match results. With SBMM I get punished for playing better by getting matched against harder and harder opponents so that it feels like treading water, even in "unranked" game modes. SBMM is also an abusable system, as dedicated players will often make several accounts to play on and take advantage of their assumed lack of skill as their matchmaking rank is calibrated, throwing the whole thing out of whack.
They can be as competitive or as casual as you like, are "soft-multiplayer", essentially single player inside a multiplayer economy, and the better ones are non-p2w.
One factor not talked about enough is that multiplayer games are kind of limited in the "experience" you can create. Single player experiences are unbound. The fact that you can narrate "stories" is what allows gamers to "experience" new things.
Yeah, almost every multiplayer-focused game nowadays seems to be trying to be the next big e-sport. There's always somebody who's fully focused on the meta and being competitive, and lashing out at people who don't. I have too much work , too much social life and too many hobbies, I'm not going to spend even more time gittin gud for internet strangers.
I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
Nintendo has the right idea with avoiding any kind of group or voice chat in Splatoon and Mario Kart. Those are always fun online multiplayer experiences for me.
Maybe I'm just old and washed but it seems like kids these days take multiplayer games way more seriously. Instead of hopping on and playing a few games after school/work people act more like they are trying to make the college sports team. The amount of time and effort required to hold you own has gone up dramatically.
Because they are, at least some of them. E-sports has opportunity for making money in ways that some people are never going to have. There's also the entire ability of streaming and earning by doing that stuff. Game promoters paying out to have IAPs pushed as well.
All of this never existed in mine or your days when our parents just knew that video games would ruin us with no way of making money in them. Even the dream of becoming a game developer wasn't even a thing.
You know those after-school math tutoring academies that pop up in American strip malls? One of those opened up near me, but instead of grilling your kids in calc or trig to improve their SAT scores, it's an "esports academy" for young hopefuls.
I think there's more going on culturally than just that. Regular sports got more competitive at a younger age, too, and there has always been the possibility of going pro and earning money from it, plus college scholarships.
That's just progression of the world. The first video game was a simple thing like Pong. Now, we have entire immersive 3D worlds. Someone/something is always the first, but those that come after will/can be bigger, better, faster. The first mass produced car was a Model-T, now we have Mustangs, GTXs, Porsches, blah blah.
Not sure how old you are, but I'm around 30, started playing against others back when CS1.5 was launched, and we participated in our LAN party. It was before I had 24/7 internet connection at home, so after and before school was spent practicing with bots, then once a quarter or something we could play against each other, seeing who had "trained" the best since last time.
Already at that point many of my friends were pretty competitive, even though neither of us really had the means to become HeatoN even if we tried. I think this must have been early 2000s something I think?
There was a competitiveness to it, but it was a fun friendly competitiveness. The kind of competitiveness you have when you go bowling with friends, or play poker. You're trying your hardest to win, sure, but also: it's just fun with friends.
These days "play online" so often means "play with complete strangers you've never talked to before and most likely never will again".
Even for large popular games like Unreal Tournament you typically joined a set of favourite servers, and had the same set of "regulars" hanging around.
It's like old-school relatively small-scale forums vs. reddit or Twitter.
You can still kind-of get this experience if you try hard enough, but it's not really the default and typically nothing is geared towards it.
The thing is that most people who want a more casual multiplayer experience now just have their own servers or play in some other setting where it's easy to just play with your friends and nobody else. They'll play on a private Valheim/Minecraft server, or party up in Warzone or Fortnite, or play a private Civ game hosted p2p, or just visit each other in Animal Crossing. I think in general this is where Gen-Z is moving: less engagement with open platforms, more with private ones. That is why Discord is such a big deal as well. The problem with the current state of the internet is that if you let just anyone in you have to deal with trolls, or bots, or scammers, or incels, or whatever, and nobody wants to deal with that. Even on public chess servers you'll get like five messages a month saying "your opponent was cheating, sorry about that," who actually wants to talk to randos these days?
Back in late 90s that level of competitiveness was there, but was relegated to clans / guilds. Algorithmic match play changed all that because casual play no longer allowed regulars to get to know each other. It made casual competitiveness possible and together with popularity / normalization, many things changed.
As an aside I miss the old days, but i also found grinding overwatch and eventually leveling up in my mid 30s (pre kids) to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in spite of the unmanaged toxicity. I don't have any competitive gamer friends and the match play i dislike also made it possible to experience something i think i would not otherwise have had access to.
The problem is that every modern online game does not allow custom hosted servers. In the good old days of online multiplayer, I would load into a Halo 1 map with 30 other people set to capture the flag (a multiplayer mode that seems to almost not exist anymore!) where the server runs 24/7, and if either side wins, the same players get mixed into two new teams in a "balancing" way, and the game just starts back up. Most people were playing because "I just want to shoot someone" was fun on it's own.
This made online games essentially a public place, where people might even get to know each other and "hang out", and you could join the same people day after day, get to know habits, make friends and rivals, etc. It was extremely low competitiveness, and nothing that happened really mattered. It didn't matter if you sucked or were amazing, because you would likely end up on the team with everyone in the server at some point, so people got wildly different gameplay experiences. This even meant that different servers could target different styles of play. You could go to the really tryhard team deathmatch servers with carefully balanced maps and active admin management for cheaters and balance purposes, or you could join the match on cramped Beaver Creek with zero shields and infinite shotguns and rockets, where average lifespan was measured in tenths of seconds, but that chaos was a great breather if you didn't feel competitive that day.
No matter how shitty you were, you could find a community that felt right to you, and you were likely to even dominate occasionally when you had good days and got lucky, so that even people who suck at the game felt the high of victory.
Nowadays, game devs insist not being utterly steamrolled by minute thirty is "not fun", and enforce near perfect a perfect 1:1 win/loss ratio through matchmaking systems, where you never see the same player twice, so they don't exist as fellow humans in your mind but as hostile "agents" that you must struggle against, and everyone feels average because your instantaneous success is basically driven by who got the advantage in the random matchmaking process. Everyone is forced to feel average about their performance, because everyone is forcibly given an average experience.
A lot of that existed long before now, but it was always opt-in. If you wanted custom servers, you could go have that fun and chaos, but if you were feeling competitive, you could jump into matchmaking and have the enforced global balance of that system give you specific matches you were emotionally prepared for and explicitly seeking out.
BUT..... companies had to get rid of custom servers, because it's way harder to sell digital items for a game if players can just go on private and custom servers that turn off or disable the checks for if you have "purchased" whatever skin you want to wear. All the bullshit A/B testing and metrics companies have made up to assure us that "people like this better" is just to defend their business strategy.
I got into online gaming with Cs 1.6 and cs:cz normal online was kinda competitive but you had a lot of joke maps or non competive ones(climbing maps). I don't think they're as popular now since a lot of games have matchmaking and ranked unlocks as the default multilayer. I'm way out of the loop mind you, I learn a lot more to PvE multilayer now(left4dead and deep rock)
I think a lot of players are also tired of games that are only fun with in-app purchases. I avoid any game now that has in-app purchases because it might be a great game where you can buy fancy hats but why would I waste any time trying to find that rare gem amidst all the pay-2-win sewage out there.
I think cosmetics and other in app purchases have a generational divide. I have no clue why people would throw real money on a skin, I just never got that perspective. Meanwhile if you go to some reddit thread on some new game you can see a bunch of gen z users talking about how they feel about the cosmetics, expecting there to be more or better cosmetics, wishing for more cosmetics as paid DLC, as if that is a compelling selling point of the game to have some good cosmetics to look at. It definitely seems like a bit more vain generation compared to the millennials in terms of the clothes and accessories so maybe that checks out with everything else.
Real life is pay2win so I have no idea why I would want more of that as an escape.
The worst part is with constant updates you can buy a game and then have it changed into pay2win later. At least with single player you might be able to keep playing the old version.
> Real life is pay2win so I have no idea why I would want more of that as an escape.
I dislike pay2win, but the logic behind that sentence could be used to rule out lots, maybe even the majority, of games..,
Not just things like Eurotruck Simulator or Farming Sim or whatever, but games in general tend to be "more of what yo get in real life, but altered". From sports games to car racing to battles fought with weapons... people do find simulated reality to be a good escape.
That's the great part about MTX. you can have the 1% more than make up for the 99% that opt out. And apparently the median spending on MTX is $60 as is.
So you see that and see why companies push so hard for that space. maintaining one game is also cheaper than trying to make new AAA games every 2-5 years and MP games provide a steady revenue stream. A subscription without calling it a subscription.
TBF, most mobile games do indeed have chat/dm's. I'm guessing the console games don't do that because it's a logistical nightmare. A sentiment much rarer in Eastern cultures for whatever reason.
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I used to like multi-player shooters, when I was young and had infinite time to devote to "git gud." I also played games for the challenge back then. Now that I'm old, I don't have infinite time to upskill, and I mostly play games to relax and unwind after work. I specifically don't want a challenge. Unfortunately, every multi-player first person shooter seems to be geared towards (and infested with) sweaty professional gamers who do nothing but practice, and of course they wipe the floor with me.
Game companies try to solve this with so-called "skill based matchmaking[1]" which purports to match you with other players of similar skill, but I've never seen it actually work. Every game is full of sweats who somehow have cracked SBMM so that they get into games with less-skilled players like me and punch way below their weight.
I wish games would just go back to letting the user choose their own difficulty level. Sad that that's kind of gone out of fashion.
Are you only interested in PVP? The PVE shooters can be a lot more chill (Destiny, Division, Borderlands, Remnant, etc.)
If you get a friend or two together who don't mind oldies, the old Tom Clancy games (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell) are a blast to play through in coop too.
Will have to try them. I like shooters, but I prefer to play against push-over AI bots instead of 13 year old pro humans. I guess that's what PVE means.
Well, sort of. PvE just means "player vs environment", a holdover/loan word from MMOs where that was the default, vs being able to attack other players in PvP areas.
When applied to shooters, though, typically it means that the game was designed around asymmetric battles between players and AI enemies. Asymmetric means that the enemies aren't just bots taking the place of humans, with the same rules, weapons, health, etc. Instead, they are usually a mix of different enemy types... easy to kill grunts, the occasional sniper, the melee berserker, and of course the "bullet sponge" bosses that take forever to kill and feel more like old MMO raids than a normal opponent in a shooter. They're not meant to simulate real players (even shitty ones), but to give more of a feel of a traditional video game campaign. For like the super-boiled-down version of this, Serious Sam is just endless hordes of enemy types running at you. A more modern take would be the roguelite shooter genre, like Risk of Rain 2 or Gunfire Reborn, which offers only endless combat and not much else. The other titles I mentioned usually have some sort of story and some form of permanent progression in the form of new weapons, abilities, etc.
If that isn't what you want, then yeah, it's bots in regular PvP shooters that you'll have to look for :( I think they are relatively rare these days, but you can still play the old Unreal Tournaments, Quakes, Doom, etc.
Worth noting that even in the FPS genre, that sort of PvE gameplay is actually the original gameplay style, that got subsumed by the massive popularity of PvP shooters later on.
Early FPSes like Wolfenstein, Doom, and the Marathon trilogy were primarily about killing asymmetric AI enemies—and even sometimes (moreso in the Marathon games) progressing through a story.
Doom had deathmatches, where you fought each other instead of the enemies. PvP in general is as old as FPS multiplayer (talking about PvE in single-player is redundant).
I guess I see that more as single-player vs multiplayer rather than PvE vs PvP. But I think your point is that the emphasis shifted from an entirely developer-created experience to one where other players are a major/dominant part of the experience. This shift didn't take that long, though, with multiplayer-only games becoming prevalent (Tribes, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, etc.) even before the 1990s were out, and single-player mode becoming a vestigial element even in those games that still included it before the end of the next decade.
Something else I haven't seen mentioned in the comments yet is the rapid pace of AAA title acquisitions by players. I never played as many games as my "gamer" friends, but over the last several years the pace that people pick up and put down games is staggering. Most of my friends will have acquired, played and stopped playing 4-6 games in the time it takes me to get to the oldest one in the current cycle (at which point there are no friends left who are willing to play with.)
Microsoft at least is heading towards a "Netflix for games" streaming model, which gives players very low switching costs between games in the Xbox GamePass market. I pay ~$20 per month and have rental access to a group of AAA games that would cost $1,000's to purchase.
FWIW, the Switch has this and so does the SteamDeck. I'm a father of 3, 5 year old twins and a 3 year old, so it's the killer feature for me on my SteamDeck.
depends on the game, to be honest. Resident's Evil tension would be demolished if you could save in the middle of battle, or right before you turn a corner.
But also yes, modern consoles do have a suspend feature. PC's can't do it as easily because of various Windows API issues, I assume.
Well, anything can be ruined by a pause at a bad moment, but it’s great when each individual player can decide for themselves whenever their circumstances require interruption at the cost of potential experience disruption, or not.
I think it’s less about player experience, though, but more about save system complexity (how much data needs to be persisted), aka lower dev costs.
Difficulty is a factor, sure. But Console TRCs (technical requirements Checklist) are very strict on a save/load system in each game. And if you don't pass a TRC you can't ship on console (usually... I'm sure greased hands happened with certain releases).
It's complicated but also not a spot to skimp out on. So the incremental cost to design it as anytime isn't that much more than a checkpoint. Most modern games have pretty lax save systems anyway (basically anywhere that isn't a battle), so I feel it's becoming more of a moot problem.
I'm probably in the minority, as I've gotten older, I no longer enjoy single player games. I'd say most gamers have gotten pretty pissed off that we're paying for AAA titles and then still being bombarded on a game-by-game basis for battle passes (basically add-on subscriptions).
As another child mentioned dont play AAA games. AAA games budgets have gotten so big the entire project becomes about how they are going to make a profit on their $100 million cost instead of making a good game. Even if they wanted to make a good game with projects that size you get corporate management and design by committee that will always result in crap.
You don't even have to go full indie. There are plenty of amazing games that are maybe best described as AA instead of AAA. Let me start by recommending most of Nintendo's catalog.
This is a my-taste thing more than a their-quality thing, but it's been literal years since I've enjoyed a Nintendo-platform-exclusive title if you exclude any that were from a famous franchise that's old enough to drink good scotch. I don't have that same problem with PlayStation - there are loads of great games in between the Horizon/GOW/etc. prestige releases.
I've tried, but I just don't enjoy the PS-style "prestige" games. I want my games to above all be fun, and I just don't find the gameplay loop of the Horizons/GoWs/etc. to be very engaging. It always seems like there is more emphasis on the production values than in making sure the player is having a good time.
I own a PS5, and the absolute most fun I've had on the system is Astro Bot, followed closely by Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart. Everything else I've enjoyed has either been a PS4 game or an indie game.
A useful shorthand for my taste is that most games that fall into E-for-Everyone on the ESRB ratings scale (or even the 10+ version) are probably not something I'm particularly attracted to. There are outliers, especially since Nintendo does their best to stay family-friendly to a fault because that's their brand/history. TOTK is E10, for example, and I certainly enjoyed it, but that's the "legendary franchise" exemption bucket again.
But stuff like Astro, Splatoon, Ratchet and Clank, whatever latest Mario title, anything Rabbids or Rayman, etc. don't speak to me at all anymore. I never played R&C in any of the Playstation generations, and I never liked Crash Bandicoot when I tried that. I sort of remember liking Spyro when it was contemporary.
Given the selection bias of who publishes what games where, it's hardly a surprise to me that I'm not getting much mileage out of my Switch. Nintendo feels like a brand that's tailored most of all for my kid nephew and any appealing titles for me are largely exceptional.
To some degree I think my tastes are a response to a trend that I hated during my formative years. When the sixth generation of video game consoles came out when I was in high school (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, XBox), there was this sudden near-universal trend to make everything darker and edgier. Grand Theft Auto was making senators faint with concern, Sega gave Shadow the Hedgehog a gun and the ability to say "damn", Naughty Dog took Jak and Daxter from "Banjo-Kazooie on PS2" to "GTA-lite for edgy preteens", etc. etc. Everyone but Nintendo, who were cheerfully putting out Super Mario Sunshine, was doing it.
At the time, I was just starting to think of video games as an art form in addition to a source of entertainment, and the blatant fad-chasing I was seeing across nearly the entire industry turned my stomach. Of course the same thing had happened many times before and has happened many times since, but I wasn't in my formative years for any of those.
>t's been literal years since I've enjoyed a Nintendo-platform-exclusive title if you exclude any that were from a famous franchise that's old enough to drink good scotch.
Xenoblade and monolith as a whole has been amazing for RPGs post nintendo acquisition. And Splatoon is super popular these days (but is very MP centric).
Thing is Nintendo doesn't really need to make new franchises every other year like Sony. their new, semi-known franchises from the last decade has been Splatoon and ARMS. But they constantly reinvent their old IPs and tend to give it sufficient time to bake. Stuff like Breath of the Wild may as well have been a different franchise for what a departure it was from the Zelda formula.
Also helps they can just dig in their wine closet and bring out some untouched scotch. It can take out F Zero, Kid Icarus, Golden Sun, Warioland, Mother, and a dozen other franchises and they may as well feel new to the next generation. Sony instead abandoned all their talent and moved HQ.
As with similar complaints about film, I can only assume folks complaining that there’s nothing good because lots of the big-budget ones are lazy and bad, either didn’t look very hard, or has super-narrow taste (which is ok! Just… not a problem for me)
I can’t even come close to keeping up with the probably-good entries in either category, film or single-player(-friendly) games. They could stop making more and it would be quite a while before that was any kind of problem for me. My backlog gets a ton larger every year.
Everyone keeps talking about the death of film by superhero, but what they really mean is the death of Hollywood. There are brilliant directors working today - Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Johnathan Glazer, Lee Chang-dong, Claire Denis, Park Chan-wook, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and so many more, they just aren’t American.
Hell, plenty of good American movies come out every year, too. There are a shitload of movies released each year, even just the ones big enough to get noticed nationally or internationally, not just art projects that only play once at a local library or something. It doesn’t take a large proportion of those being good before they’re outpacing the rate at which most people watch movies, even if all that watching goes to movies released in the last year or so—me, I’m also still catching up on the thousands of good-to-great movies released in the first century+ of cinema.
Some of the good ones are even Hollywood movies. They just might not be action movies (sometimes they are!) or might not have a super-sized marketing budget, so I guess lots of folks only see the handful that get advertised heavily and figure those are the only movies, but even Wikipedia or IMDB’s list of films released each year are looooong and they don’t capture everything.
Asian media has absolutely exploded. China, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan have all put out a lot of good TV and movies in the past few years. It's definitely given me a refuge from the increasing proportion of American and British media that's crap.
well, Single Player games don't really have battle passes nor subscriptiosn. Some skin or expansion DLCs, but most of the popualar games are multiplayer, and most of the complaints are from multiplayer gamers.
SP games are fine for gamers outside of the $70 price increase (which I'm fine with), but apparently it's getting harder and harder to profit from SP these days. Not surprising with longer dev times, larger dev teams, and a stagnation of the console market.
"Hitting a few singles and doubles beats trying to hit a home run and striking out."
As game developers and publishers have consolidated into mega corps this line just isn't true anymore. You need a billion dollar game to move the corporate needle these days. It's a very similar dynamic to what has happened in Hollywood. All the mid-budget projects are being squeezed out and you either go very low budget/indie or you go huge budget and swing for the fences. There is no career reward in the current corporate marketplace for modest wins.
Does what the article is arguing make any sense? AAA studios cancelled some live service games and that means fewer single player games made.
But it doesn't follow that the live service aspect is what killed the games. Games are cancelled all the time.
And then saying there's an industry trend but what's brought up is how those games were cancelled, not brought down by the user sentiment of live services.
And their data point is a 53% preference? It just seems poorly argued to me.
The headline is a bit of a dogwhistle, capitalizing on deep held sentiment among gamers, that unfortunately doesn't bear out in the market. I think many have pointed out that there are excellent smaller single player indies, but the risk to create an expensive single-player only game has become too great for most developers. It is very similar to the current state of cinema -- where people say they prefer different kinds of or better movies, but they only reliably turn out for sequels and superhero movies.
I think the mistake being made is instead of opting to build a cheaper, higher quality single player games they opt to created an expensive, AAA live service (for a minute they were calling them Destiny killers) -- which is a tough landing to stick. You'll notice that the success stories took long investments Fortnite's pivot from a grindy co-op game to a genre defining battle royale or maybe even Apex's stealth development and launch.
Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim. So the question these studios have to ask is "can I make a game that will get people to put down Skyrim or Civ V." That's a big ask.
>Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim
you don't even need a study, just check out Steam's most played games as of this posting:
- DOTA 2 is #3, PUBG is right under it.
- Rust is 5.5 years old and #9. Apex is a bit newer but still #10.
- Baldur's Gate 3 is a single player game over a year old (and AFAIK, it's major updates are finished), and today is still top 15.
- and of course GTA V is still #11, a game that has now spanned 3 generations.
When you make a big game, it captures people for a very long time. That's what companies are trying to do when they chase Fortnite.
"Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games."
I've long tried not to buy every console, because it gets expensive for no good reason. So as our Switch is aging, I metaphorically poked my head up and put my finger to the wind... and decided our "next console" is the Steam Deck I already owned. And a big part of that decision is new games are frankly not any better than old games. They look better, and that's it, and that often comes at the cost of the real interactivity of the game anyhow.
I wouldn't put a specific date on it, but game tech basically plateaued 10-15 years ago, even if the numbers keep going up. The graphics were good enough, especially if strong art direction knew how to use them. The tech for creating great games was basically all in place, and we got to where having 10 times the polygons just wasn't important anymore. Games are a lot more like movies to me now... I don't sit there looking at "was this movie 2021 or 2023?" as if that's going to indicate an important difference in quality, and games are getting to be that way for me.
It's consultant bullshit research, not even doing proper science. For example it talks about the popularity of PvP--the actual argument it wants to say is, companies should develop single-player games because existing PvP games are locked in to an audience already. Which makes the title completely misleading and a clever/unscrupulous consultant might say such a sweeping statement to get access to companies' interest.
I've spent a lot of time lately playing a game called Ravenfield. It has replaced CS2 as my main game. The graphics are bad, it's purely single player, the AI is not great, but it allows for large scale battles with none of the pain of playing against other people. Mods are free and there are tons, with new ones created weekly. No need to pay for upgrades or game packs or seasons or crates.
What do you mean "graphics are bad" in Ravenfield? It's not photorealistic, but it's a game. Tetris is also not photorealistic. But it's a great game about plastic soldier figures using plastic toy battle gear to play an actual plastic war.
We prefer same/shared screen co-op (Diablo 3 and 4, A Way Out, etc.), and story campaign PvE co-op (e.g. Wildlands, BG3).
Shared screen co-op is annoyingly difficult to find since "couch co-op" doesn't differentiate split screen versus shared screen and we strongly dislike split screen.
Story co-op is increasingly difficult to find. When you do find them, they tend to be less campaign or story and more "repeated encounter" scenarios (e.g., Insurgent). There is nothing like the strategically deliberate plan and work together pace of Wildlands since Wildlands.
Worse, recent co-op campaign games tend to be add-on modes to PvP, meaning you have to contend with ridiculous "balance" boosts and nerfs so nothing works like it should if it was a single player game. PvE should not be "balanced" this way.
If you didn't already try "It Takes Two" then you owe it to yourselves to try, although I don't know off the top of my head if it's playable as shared-screen.
It definitely ticks the "co-op story" game box though, and is overall a great game.
Like for Pikmin where in the later editions there were multiple main characters on the field that you could switch between. How was there not a local co-op where each player could use a main character?
If you liked BG3, have you tried the Divinity Original Sin series by the same studio? They're even better in co-op IMO and not being limited to the D&D rules makes combat more fun and dynamic.
Online games are like DRM. You need third party servers and internet connection to run it. You can lose your profile if provider/developer choose it. You are forced to accept every updates.
Chances, that you'll deal with problems and unwilling changes are higher than just start an offline single-player game.
Single player games are always how they were, you are running local software after all. If anything they get better with time with bug fixes and community mod ecosystems that continue to improve and overhaul the experience.
Multiplayer games are of course not strictly local software, but their experience extends beyond software itself into forming an abstract community of people. You might come on to a multiplayer game and enjoy it for a time, but its in its nature that this community will shift. The casuals move on to newer titles that have all the other casuals on it now. The greybeards left playing halo 3 today are total sweats now who stomp you every time you have a happy memory of getting a killstreak 15 years ago and foolishly open master chief collection.
> Single player games are always how they were, you are running local software after all.
Balance fixes (yes, in single player games) show that this is not always the case. Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring have both had several gameplay tactics nerfed.
I'm actually considering going back to world of warcraft because some of the new features allow you to experience the previously multiplayer required portions on your own.
As a lifelong and avid gamer, multiplayer games - in my experience, at least - typically trend toward highly toxic, abusive, sometimes degenerate behavior. Communities in which this does not happen seem to be quite rare (I can't recall one offhand). Trolling is rampant, cheating/exploitation is normal, and elitism is pervasive. It really takes the fun out of games.
These days, I generally avoid games that are multiplayer-only, and for games with multiplayer elements, I try to avoid those and focus on single-player elements instead.
It could be selection bias based on my gaming preferences, of course, but based on feedback I've heard from others who play games that I do not, it seems to be largely the same everywhere multiplayer is involved.
In my experience, ONE thing will cause a game to trend towards toxicity - higher stakes. The more "important" the win or loss feels to the player, the more toxicity shows up.
It's pretty easy to filter out "toxic" games if you filter out anything which has a ranked mode and is not designed to be played infinitely.
Unfortunately, games in the online era have trended in that direction, because they are the most profitable.
For example, some variables that affect toxicity:
- competitiveness, often implemented by sort of ranked system, but also just any sort of head-to-head competition. Tournaments and betting will do this as well.
- longer investment (via playtimes, either of a single "run" or in total) - people won't get mad at a 5-10 minute game as much as a 1 hour game. Games as a service like MMOs where people have 1000s of hours of playtime are the extreme end of this.
- punishing gameplay, where a mistake can cause you to lose a lot of progress (Hardcore modes where dying means you have to restart your character, for example)
- tone (casual vs serious tone, e.g. Fall Guys vs Call of Duty) - More serious generally results in more toxicity.
Adjusting these variables can even turn a single player game into a toxic one (e.g. self-imposed challenges/achievements, Dark Souls, Jump King or Getting Over It).
Similarly, you can lower the stakes so that the gameplay doesn't devolve into toxicity, even with multiplayer (e.g. Animal Crossing)
> It could be selection bias based on my gaming preferences
Major factor IME. If you're playing any AAA or one of the top-10-or so FPSes or MOBAs, sure. Hanging out with friends when they're playing online multiplayer less in-fashion older and indie games: Very little of that if any, there.
I'm with you, but to make a (competely arbitrary) parallel: It's possible to love R&B music but still have a miserable time when you go to a concert with The Weeknd because you don't vibe with the crowd and you think the party sucks. That doesn't mean you can't have a good time going out to live shows in general and find parties you enjoy with people you vibe with.
Similarly, I love clubbing but have absolutely 0 interest going to any of the major couple of venues that catch the bigger crowds in town.
"Abstract: Toxicity is a widespread phenomenon in competitive online video games. In addition to its direct undesirable effects, there is a concern that toxicity can spread to others, amplifying the harm caused by a single player’s misbehavior. In this study, we estimate whether and to what extent a player’s toxic speech spreads, causing their teammates to behave similarly. To this end, we analyze proprietary data from the free-to-play first- person action game Call of Duty®: Warzone™. We formulate and implement an instrumental variable identification strategy that leverages the network of interactions among players across matches. Our analysis reveals that all else equal, all of a player’s teammates engaging in toxic speech increases their probability of engaging in similar behavior by 26.1 to 30.3 times the average player’s likelihood of engaging in toxic speech. These findings confirm the viral nature of toxicity, especially toxic speech, in competitive online video games."
You can also add DDoS to the list too. Ive been long DooM player but I stepped back due to above crap and DDoSes on my servers. Now I play mostly offline, ocassioanlly spawning server for friends only.
I really enjoyed PvP and PvE shooters with my friend group in secondary school (that's 11 to 18 or so), but I don't get the same feeling with people I don't know. I do some occasionally with other friends but it's just not the same as it was then.
My taste in games has changed too as I've gotten older - I find myself mostly playing a mix of older games, story rich RPGs and indie titles - eg things like Tyranny, Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, OpenTTD, Rimworld, Slay the Spire... twitchy FPS games just don't do it for me any more.
So this article's main findings (the splits by age) definitely fits with me - I'm out of the <25 age group and have been for a while ;)
I don’t game at all these days. I think the last games I played were Overwatch and LoL around 2018.
Speaking as my 2018 self, I grew quickly bored of single player games and felt most were not worth the money. Pay $60 and maybe get a week or two’s worth of entertainment. I was never into replaying static content or grinding for meaningless badges or trophies.
Meanwhile multiplayer games have significantly more dynamic playtime for the money.
I can’t speak for the state of gaming in 2024 though.
Yeah, nowadays people like you are amortized by people paying hundreds for skins. So it's basically a win-win if you aren't tempted to spend on battle passes or skins or whatnot.
But that causes more outrage on social media, even though the wisdom statistics state that the top 10% spenders can make up half the revenue of a game.
Can an apparent preference for Online PvP amongst 16-19 age cohort be explained by a lack of disposable income? Online PvP games are often free (with different monetization schemes), so that removes one large barrier to entry?
It's certainly possible. We're approaching a generation of gamers that may have never actually had to spend on games, nor ask their parents to get them GTA for Christmas. That kind of market may never even consider the idea of buying a game outright, even when they do get dispoable income.
Online gaming used to be about having fun. And while those communities definitely still exist, the landscape is dominated by "competitive" gaming that brings out the worst in people.
The relentless pushing of "battle passes," in-gaming loot crate gambling, and in-game upgrades using real-life money from game publishers.
There's also the whole "you can't pause real life" thing. Much easier to play online when you're young and don't have real responsibilities - but that's not a luxury most adults have.
and sadly many reasons industry will continue to chase multiplayer.
- higher spending cap. for minimal effort you can refresh battle passes and other monetization post launch. Making DLC for a single player game still takes effort to design and polish. And despite online protest, a lot of people clearly buy these.
- longevity. Single player games have the same curves as ever where they make big sales in the first few months and peter out to a trickle by the time it's out for a year. And these are games that take multiple years to make at the AAA level.a successful MP game can run for years and merely iterate instead of re-invent entire campaigns and character designs.
- external events/ads. some top games try to do an e-sports gauntlet to engage people and further cement their brand. they can release 3rd party skins to bring up player numbers. They can benefit more from streamers. At best, a SP game can try some collaboration content, which is much larger scale and may not create much buzz.
When I got Batman Arkham Asylum it had Games for Windows Live required. I didn't want an account online or "live" scoreboard, at the time you could choose local only as an option.
Imagine my surpise when GfWL lost all my save games halfway through. Why? Who knows. Maybe an GfWL update? Maybe a game update? I severely reduced my gaming after that and have been adamant for true standalone games only (thank you GOG games).
Note: I do not mind multiplayer online games. I have been known to play DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online) off and on.
The problem with most perpetual multiplayer games is that they are potentially limitless time sinks. They are often inherently addictive with no natural end or resolution to them. Of course there are single player games that do this too, so it's not the only differentiator.
In contrast, single player campaigns (or co-op campaigns for that matter) are often story driven. They have a beginning and an end. They offer catharsis. If it's good, you may play through it again, but it will end eventually.
Yeah, different taste. You can see a few here argue that $60 for a single player game is not worth the value. Some want that sink to come back to and sink a few hours into. Some are pretty free upfront, so their monetary investment can even be $0, amortized by whales.
I think the push for multiplayer games made me quit gaming about 10-15 years ago. It was only in the last couple years that the new Zelda games got me back into it, which are single player.
I will sometimes play multiplayer games with my nephews, but would always prefer to play by myself. If I'm playing a game I want it to be fun and not stressful. When everything is a competition, it's stressful. There's not letting up, no lazy laps... you have to try to win.
They often want me to play Minecraft with them. I "forget" to bring my laptop a lot. When I played Minecraft in the past it was always on peaceful and I'd just build stuff. It was a giant sandbox of digital legos for me, or I'd try and make weird stuff with redstone. They have all these monsters turned on, want to go into these boss battles, and they never give me any weapons (and disable my ability to get my own) so I just die over and over again trying to run from things with no defenses. It's awful. Half the time I just stop playing and stare the the screen, like wtf do you want me to do here...
I'm sure the industry hates the idea that most people prefer single players games, because then they can't justify their online services, so they are incentivized to push multiplayer games and make people think that's what they like.
I also gave up on multiplayer and casually playing on Nintendo Switch has got me back into it. For me, it's a skill issue. I'm just not as good as I used to be. I play games on easy now so that I can blast through it quickly. Otherwise I'll (have to) set the game down for a couple weeks and completely forget what was going on in the game.
I have the complete opposite experience with Minecraft. My kids play peaceful flat land creative and it's the most boring thing to me. I'll take boss fights without weapons any day.
> I have the complete opposite experience with Minecraft. My kids play peaceful flat land creative and it's the most boring thing to me. I'll take boss fights without weapons any day.
Flat land creative is boring. I agree with you there. I would use a normal world and explore it a bit, find a good spot to make my home, mine for materials, create a store room for all of stuff getting mined, make secret entrances that would trigger with pistons and stuff, things like that. I guess some people might find that boring too, but I found it pretty relaxing. Of course this was usually just something to do on the side, while something else was going on. As a singular focus I won't do it.
I used to work a job with a lot of downtime, so it was perfect for that. Something to fill the time, but easy to pick up and put down as needed, and I could still keep an eye on what was going on at work to know if I needed to do something.
For sure... The one was being a jerk, so I was just threw it right back at him and started destroying the whole settlement he built. Emptying his chests into lava breaking down walls... to see how he likes playing with a griefer.
Minecraft has the distinction of being the only game I've played with my kids where I still felt like a parent even in the game. It wasn't even just policing "bad behavior", sometimes I had to run around covering over the ravines so they wouldn't fall in, because then I had to go rescue them. Now they're older and I still had to sometimes go rescue them after they made an ill-considered journey without supplying well enough in advance.
I'm not complaining per se. It's just interesting that the game is able to have that dynamic in it.
They're older now, it's much less of an issue, but I still mandate that PvP stays off at all times. Though it is a useful lesson in the mechanics of escalation, I suppose.
(Specifically, you always value harm to yourself more than you value harm to others, even your family, so when someone does "1" damage to you, you perceive it as "2", then you try to retaliate with "2" damage but they perceive it as "4" damage for the same reason, and now you're stuck in an escalating loop. There are ways out of this loop, of course, but it takes time. This rather simple model explains a rather distressing amount of international politics and history....)
Knowing a couple commands, and having them switched on, can be helpful for the ravine issue. The /tp command can be used to teleport a player (your kid) to where your player is.
My nephews of course would use this against me. I’d get away into a calm area and they’d teleport me right into the middle of hell.
I'm an early-internet player, but I used to really enjoy games like KingsOfChaos, Outwar, Neopets and Runescape (OG version, or 2007 reboot).
It sounds weird, and not what most people would consider as "gaming" but all of those were a mix of solo & coop since they had a social aspect but totally playable alone (well, KingsOfChaos would be kind of silly to play alone).
It seems like only the OG runescape still has some sort of following, the other ones died out (there was a different one with space ships and planets and power levels, but I forget the name - same principle as Outwar and KingsOfChaos).
There was also a Russian one based on the Dozory universe (Night Watch) by Sergey Lukianenko (one of my favorite authors), but that mostly turned into a cash grab which is a bummer because it's one of the coolest game concepts out there - it has been my dream that someone actually makes that game.
My gaming time is split between online PVP fighting games (Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive) and single-player games (Elden Ring, Yakuza). If I had to pick one, I'd go with single player.
The online experience is great compared to even a few years ago (when it wasn't acceptable), but not perfect in terms of loading times and lag.
Seems the first Street Fighter game with rollback netcode was in 2008, another in 2011.[1] But perhaps the implementation was poor? I'm not a fighting game expert.
These were rereleases of fairly old games (i.e. niche titles, where most of the people were just playing on emulators). It's also not enough to have rollback netcode, it still needs to be implemented properly, the game needs to have good matchmaking, etc. These weren't new, mainstream releases.
This is why I feel fighting games pretty much left the western scene. It's a very stringent fanbase but not necessarily one that will pay more than some shooter game.
Which is ironic given that Asian games have the biggest whales, but Asia was always 2 steps ahead with lootboxes. The skins in SF6 look great, but they are definitely banking on the fact that <5% of the active players will even consider buying them.
Yeah that's fair. I've been playing some GG Strive recently and compared to how it used to be playing fighting games online, 50/50 you're either against a pleb or Leffen, it's been nice to have somewhat consistent matchmaking in terms of skill. It does fuck it up from time to time though.
My brain has a switch. I either want to try-hard or I want to relax. Try hard mode means I'm playing competitive multiplayer (cs2 is my current poison). Relax mode means I'm playing something single-player and easy. Unfortunately, this makes it so I pretty much can't play dark souls, souls-likes, or any other single player games that advertise as "hard". When I'm in relax mode, I have zero desire to run my head against a wall over and over just to continue a story or world exploration. I wish more games had a mode like "Another Crab's Treasure" where you can simply press a button to kill the boss (there's an option to "give Kril a gun" in the settings).
Please just give me back my OG mass effect, og warcraft, StarCraft, monkey islands, kings quests that I can play on my own and has a good story. I don't want of the crappy mmo nonsense. One can dream!
... There are plenty of those kind of games being sold and developed, though.
I only play single player stuff and have a backlog that just keeps increasing, I can't keep with the pace. They aren't the most publicized AAA titles though (BG3 probably bring an exception given its popularity, and the Zeldas thanks to Nintendo).
It's just like music, where there's plenty of good one being made, but can't be found anywhere close to the top 10 hits or on radio (at least, for the kind of music I like).
So yeah... One can dream, but the dream is, for once, alive (mostly thanks to GoG, Steam and Humble).
I wonder to what degree the business and bureaucratic dynamics of big-budget failed live-service games are similar to big-budget Hollywood flops. The people working on it day to day know that it's crap and will not succeed, but someone in the background[0] keeps pushing the project forward anyway.
What's the disconnect? If dozens or hundreds of people intimately familiar with the project say it's no good, why don't you listen to them?
[0] in my mind's eye, mustachioed, smoking a cigar, and fanning himself with hundred-dollar bills
Most of my gaming now is honestly FreeCell on my phone, but if we want to talk about what "gamers" would consider games, the only time I really enjoy multiplayer is if I'm playing with actual friends.
I never really had much enjoyment with playing with strangers on the internet. Most of them are much better at these games than I am, and it's just way too stressful. I also have some hesitation trash-talking total strangers, but I'm perfectly fine doing that with close friends.
I played MP when I was younger (even MMOs, played WoW in the first year), but nowadays, it’s all single player. Stellaris, Civ V, and the two Owlcat Pathfinder Games (Wrath of the Righteous, which I was playing when I saw the link, and Kingmaker) are my main games where I have over 1k hours each, but I also play many other single player games. I don’t like always having to push myself to the max, or interacting with random internet people when I want to enjoy myself.
An obvious explanation for why publishers overwhelming focus on multiplayer titles despite consumer demand is that multiplayer games are much harder to pirate
Everyone is trying to build AAAA "live service" games because fortnite and friends made a gazillion dollars. They did that by essentially being a very new experience (no, shitty arma mods do not count, they were so clunky you have to be a special kind of patient and weird to enjoy them), so everyone tried it, and that meant they could capture almost any whale, and Epic eventually figured out you could milk literal children and whales for all of their money, because kids will bully each other into buying freaking character skins that used to be just an unlockable or option in multiplayer gaming
The problem is that, to properly milk the whales, you have to follow specific strategies that encourage their "I'm better than you because I paid $100 instead of wasting 100 hours" mentality, which means you have to make it suck to not be a whale so that the whales can feel so superior, and to help drive potential whales into entering their payment info and becoming milkable whales.
That means that non-whale players, the majority, have to treat the game as a part time job just to keep up with released content (which is partially enforced by the game or community) or else just not get to experience the majority of the game. The game requires more effort per unit of "fun" you want to experience because it has to in order to trigger the whale catching effects.
However, most people only have time in their life for one of these part time jobs, including the whales, which means the market is fixed. There's only enough player time and whale money to support a small, fixed number of these games. That's why they keep failing, there are strong network effects, and nobody wants to "invest" in a new game.
Single player is a different kind of experience, and no less valuable. You might as well say
> It's a lot harder to make a book have depth and complexity than it is for going to a party, since you don't have human conversation partners.
It depends on the book and the party. Similarly, maybe there is more depth and complexity to Dwarf Fortress than there is to Rocket League. (Not to pick on RL in particular, it is just the first thing that came to mind.)
I'd say Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom had a lot of depth. There was a ton of stuff to do. I have 340 hours into Tears of the Kingdom and hit 100% on the map, but there are still things I haven't done and stuff to explore and try. I find they also have a high replay value, since they are so open and there are nearly infinite ways to solve the various puzzles, traverse the world, or engage in the various battles... or don't. I once started up a new BotW game to see how far I could get without actually fighting anything.
I think it's highly dependent on the type of game. Games that involve planning and strategy like Slay the Spire or Factorio have enormous depth despite being single player. But I think that it's hard to make the actual execution of mechanics as fun or deep against computer opponents.
While I don't doubt that this is true, it also seems like the very biggest games at a given time tend to be multi-player. DOTA, Fortnite, WoW were all so genre-definingly huge that there are lists of copycats a mile long. Maybe the only comparable single-player-only game I can think of, in the last 20 or so years at least, is Dead Souls / Dark Souls.
Don't we all, here? Don't we (most of us) engineer? Is this still "Hacker" news?
(Although I do not quite grasp the intended relation of the idea to gaming. I would say it's a matter of one's own private time with oneself, one's own rhythm...)
>I do not quite grasp the intended relation of the idea to gaming
MP games play on a server that updates to its desire. you like that cool gun? it can be nerfed tomorrow. Like this strategy? well, competitive gamers can hard counter it and kill you every time. you can "take a break" by getting a good night's rest and fall in rankings overnight.
Single player games can be played on your time, your way, and (most) glitches/exploits you may find won't be patched out one day. Some games even added back in some glitches on behalf of speedrunners' requests. Even linear games can have you craft your own experience on what you did when and how you reacted. It's "your" experience. But a shared enough experience that everyone can relate and talk about it. a year 1 pvp meta may be ancient history to a year 3 meta.
I love playing multi-player games when there is a well built economy. Frankly, that economy doesn't even need to be built into the game. I've played multi-player games where the marketplace was outside the game (but still all done with in-game items).
What I hate about multi-player is when you have to play the game with others to be successful (exceptions made for those very few big bosses). I'm mostly a MMORPG player. I don't want to be in a clan or guild. I don't want to find other people to play with. I just want to log on whenever I want and play for as long or as little as I want. But, I want to be able to buy stuff in an economy.
The competitive shooters have been destroyed by cheaters. In the long term, and even the short term, cheats beat anticheat. That's why co-ops like Helldivers 2 are popular now.
My feeling is that there are basically three reasons for the focus on multiplayer:
* cheap out on development: essentially just have a few low detail maps that people play constantly
* people want to look “unique” so you can charge them for near-zero-cost assets
* people don’t complain when you say “must have an internet connection”
All of which are garbage reasons to me and just mean fewer good games, and less reason to buy them (I’m uninterested in buying a game if it is just going to stop working in a year because they’re no longer selling it).
If I want to be subject to swearing and shitty behavior is just become a high school teacher.
* Committed playerbase that stays around for a long time
* Dev time focused on making new assets and gamemodes etc. rather than needing to develop entire new games
* Designed with an intentional grind (leveling systems, battle passes, random drop chances) which slows down player progression to acquire before-mentioned aesthetic items or even mechanically important upgrades, can provide shortcuts via payment
Of course, new live services are sinking now because each one depends on attention economy. If potential players are already committed to a different live service, they don't have the time or interest to re-commit to some other new one.
We've been watching for years now as major companies sink millions into games that are DOA because they never actually had an audience willing to commit to yet another major continuing time investment that these games represent.
I think the real reason for focus on multiplayer is that it keeps the game fresh without things that are really half-baked like procedural world gen. That drives engagement- keeping people playing- which gives companies more opportunities to sell microtransactions, skins, etc.
I dont often have time for multiplayer games.. they require time at the same time as others, they are also not the sort of thing you can pause while you go stir dinner or take the bins out or whatever is actually more important.
If it was really single player, you could pause it. That's the easiest way to tell the difference. I prefer single player games. By which I mean games with a single player. Redefining it to mean something else just makes it harder to communicate IMO.
Small squad coop is a pretty excellent option. Helldivers 2 was super popular for a good reason; all the upsides of hanging out with a couple others folks and having a ridiculous time, facing absurd monsters. Warhammer Vermintide & Darktide lack the open level design but have similar upsides.
I do think multiplayer is super hard to make broadly rewarding. High skill players quickly come to dominate, often in brutal ways. I enjoyed some Star Wars: Battlefront 2 but man, a couple players who knows what they are doing rack up kills quick to earn a hero character respawn, & can often just own the heck out of most players quite well. Figuring out how you can drop good experiences for medium & low skill players is super hard.
multi-player is more competitive. single-player is more about the story & mechanics. they are complimentary and distinct genres of games.
I'm in my 40s and don't put in the effort to be competitive in multiplayer games. I have great admiration for the developers and the players who participate.
Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional jerks, I can just do things in the real world. Single-player gaming is more comfy.
Multiplayer comes with social obligation. I’m messing up other people’s good time if I drop the controller and vanish for five minutes.
I don’t feel comfortable doing that unless the chance of an interruption is extremely close to zero. Stresses me out.
> Multiplayer comes with social obligation.
My wife uses video games to relax and de-stress after having dealt with customers all day. Having to deal with more people in the evening is the last thing she needs.
You can always solo queue fortnight/apex or whatever. The worst case is you die cause you had to deal with the kid/cat/work call, if you focus on the fun of the individual engagements and don't worry about actually winning the match you'll have fun. I do understand what you're saying, multiplayer gaming does require much more intentionality. You have to make distraction free time to get the most out of it, especially if you're playing a team game there's a social contract to have the time to play the match out.
Repeatedly dying to screaming tweens is not any fun for me
You don’t have to participate in the voice chat.
Yeah but if you play a multiplayer without the "with other people" component, you are getting are strictly worse experience than a single player
Yeah. FFA pvp is less stressful because you only have your own fate to worry about. If you need to go AFK it's you just sacrifice a match.
...team pvp or even coop games need much more commitment.
Not my experience. You are right that it's less of an issue. But I very definitely stressed about individual matches and how it affects the ranking and stats. You hold it in until the match finishes and just don't join the next one right away but you still change your behavior. Or in something like WoW PvP servers you go somewhere safe before logging out etc.
SP? Hit the pause button and go.
What I dislike is how much more uncommon random matchups are. I find ranked stressful because it incentivizes making the number go up, so I prefer to be an eternal Quick Play player. But a lot of QP systems still use shadow rankings that influence who you get paired with, and they tend to give me very ping-pong results.
One game I'm dominating against the other team, but then the ball hits the other side and get paired with people above my level for the next several. It kinda makes me feel like the agency on how well I can perform is taken away from me, and I just have to hope the matchmaking system takes pity.
At least when matches were more random, sometimes I'd get paired with people above my level, but it was rare that it felt completely rigged against me.
This is the big one to me, time commitment. People spend hours on these, and if you want to "hang" with an in-group, they expect you to put in the time. No thanks. I don't want a lifestyle revolving around maximizing time on a multiplayer game.
If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
I imagine you’d find friends to play with who are able to dedicate the same amount of commitment as you are.
It's not just jerks. Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them. Then you have lag, solo team pitted against organized teams, ranking systems that arent accurate, etc.
Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair.
But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.
I played League of Legends and didn’t have any problem with the monetization scheme because you could get a great selection of characters to play paying no money (could have played the starter Sona forever) or a modest amount of money.
What did bother me was (1) games taking too long (I don’t want to tell my family I can’t help with anything for 45 minutes) and (2) jerks. In ranked there were the people who thought they could not get ahead because the players they played with (me) sucked, in unranked there were too many people who couldn’t queue successfully (learned how to play all positions, even jungle, so I wouldn’t be part of the problem of having three people who want to play top)
Anecdotally (n.b. i have like 20x the time in dota vs league) I find the matchmaker in dota does a much better job of taking your behavior metrics into account. If you're nice you'll get nice people in your games. I think it's not uncommon for the 9 other people in the game to be willing to hold a pause for a few minutes if you need to deal with an emergency.
Pay-to-win mechanics used to always mean a game was not taken seriously competitively. Now with several genres of game it's expected you will pay money to unlock "DLC" characters (e.g. Street Fighter) that you can't otherwise play, but need to play against. It's not exactly pay-to-win since the locked characters are supposed to be fairly balanced, but it's arguable since balance is never perfect and developers seem reluctant to err on the weak side for characters they're trying to sell for a profit.
there are established good competitive titles without pay2win. look at league, counter-strike for instance.
a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear.
this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
imo pay to win is a lot more rare than people imply for actual competitive multiplayer content.
Depends on the market, pay2win is rare in western-developed PC and console games but extremely common in eastern-developed games, and mobile games developed anywhere. Korean MMOs are infamous for being pay2win pretty much without exception. Not that I think western publishers would be above doing P2W if they thought they could get away with it, but their main target markets aren't primed to accept it, though that tide is shifting with the rising global popularity of gacha games.
> Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fun.
There, changed it to the proper format.
I've seen plenty of glitches in LAN games with friends that were completely unfair, but never were a problem.
My god, this. In ut99 we found, in the assault mazon fortress map, how attackers could shoot friends on top of the fortress roof from the starting point. It broke the map completely, but nobody cared. In fact, it was so cool, the defenders joined the attackers, landing on top of their own base.
> Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them
Can you share an example of this outside of mobile games?
You can buy gold in World of Warcraft.
So you can essentially skip half your character's progression arc by entering a credit card number.
Now, you can argue that the best gear is BOP (Bind on Pickup) so this isn't a huge factor, but there's still definitely an aspect of "pay to win", since there are plenty of other things you need gold for that payment skips.
You can also argue that WoW isn't competitive, but all multiplayer games have a light competition of being ahead of others in progression, even if it's not direct competition. (I'm ignoring PvP because actual PvP is a tiny minority interest. )
This description of the pay to win properties of WoW is slightly dated. Gold buys you very little in the way of gear these days. They have de-emphasized the role of gold over time because players kept buying it.
That didn't stop players from figuring out how to pay to win though. They now pay "boosting" and "carry" services - other people who group up with you and then clear dungeons while you just follow along behind them and collect the loot as it drops.
There are advertisers spamming ads for these carry services all over the place inside the game even though they're against ToS. It does still have its charms but on balance WoW really has become a train wreck.
> WoW really has become a train wreck
Do you have a recommendation for something better that's subscription based?
This shows up in fighting games, where DLC (i.e. paid) characters often have increasingly overpowered properties or even entirely new mechanics that the rest of the cast struggles to deal with.
Plenty on here. Also it's not as egregious as straight pay to win, but often it's stuff like buying a season pass to level up or unlock items faster.
https://fictionhorizon.com/best-pay-to-win-games/
1. noncompetitive game
2. mobile game
3. mobile game
4. not actually pay to win.
5. noncompetitive game
6. mobile game
You see where I'm going. You can't relate "has microtransactions" with "is pay to win". They're different.
That's only 1/3rd of that list. Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree. If you see my previous comment, it specifies "pay for advantage". Some games you have to pay to unlock gear or xp boosters to make it really playable.
> Some games you have to pay to unlock gear or xp boosters to make it really playable.
Again, can you provide an example? Also
> Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree
Is just blatantly incorrect, unless you just mean "One player is further in the game than the other", in which case literally all games are "competitive", including single player.
"Again, can you provide an example?"
I can but I won't, because I'm done with this conversation based on the inauthentic responses.
So 0 real examples have been provided, either by a commenter or via the link.
Exactly as expected.
This.
I prefer MMOs, but playing solo.
I still (very) occasionally play WoW, and that's pretty much the only game I ever play.
I'd love to try a new MMO, but they're all "free-to-play" meaning "pay to win". I just want to pay a normal monthly subscription price and explore cool worlds. Maybe interact occasionally with some other people in a guild or pickup group or something.
It's what keeps my WoW subscription active, even though I rarely play it.
Sadly, it's gotten so bad that I spend most of my brain-dead time reading Lit RPG stuff, because at least with that I can recapture some of the sense of wonder and excitement that we had during the golden age of MMOs (UO, EQ, DAOC, AC, SWG, etc...).
You could try Final Fantasy XIV—it's a traditional regular-subscription MMO that's actually picked up a lot of users in recent years. It's much more story-focused than WoW, which is a turn-off to a lot of people coming from that tradition, but it's got a free trial.
I prefer the story based thing.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a shot.
There are some which are more casual. My partner plays fornite. She's got a group she games with, and half the talking is about the game the other half is basically a catch up session with a game in the background.
there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)
Elden Ring has an interesting multiplayer mechanic, and it works quite well.
1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc.
2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps.
3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited.
4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game.
5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player.
6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader.
I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
Super Mario Wonder has a subset of these for co-op play.
fall guys has no voice chat and you are basically a jellybean playing in a japanese-inspired game show
Multiplayer has also been taken over by free2play skinner box design, so if you want games that aren't designed to waste your time with unfun but addictive gameplay loops and/or nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.
nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.
We still get our fair share of season passes and day one DLCs, so it's not total immunity.
I feel like multiplayer gaming was more fun/popular when there were more jerks, especially on the mics. It seemed like half the fun was the shit talking back in the halo 3/cod 4 era, and it really only stopped when they screwed up how lobbies worked in newer titles where you can't go on all talk between games let alone actually party up, or have proxy chat in game. At least on some PC games you can still get on the mics and PC gamers do actually still use their mics. I'm not sure if the new consoles even ship with mics anymore.
So I think there are two things here. First I agree somewhat though I think that there's a difference between good natured shit talking and being a jerk. I feel like as a kid people still could be mean but tonally it was more jovial, now I feel like I run into more miserable assholes (which I think is much worse). Secondly it still wasn't fun for everyone back in the day, especially if you were different people would try to bully you. I never had an issue but I know a lot of people who have never used public voice chat because they don't want to be harassed.
now you have people getting pissed off by "nice save!" messages used ironically in rocket league, or people getting riled up from a random goal celebration in the popular annual football game.
people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
Every PS5 controller has a built in mic/speaker. It's passable but it's no Xbox headset.
Shit talking or hearing others shit talk was half the fun. IMO, this should be resolved through the creation of moderated vs unmoderated channels. Different strokes for different folks. Instead, all channels are moderated.
It also removes a lot of the immersion. For example, I love Civ but playing with people shatters a lot of the day-dreaming.
Agreed. Casual (non-competitive, non-p2w) multiplayer is a dying breed.
I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant.
EDIT: typo meant non-competitive co-op
Heh. If we're using competitiveness as a measuring stick, Helldivers 2 is absolutely competitive. If you're not geared up with the current meta, you're frequently flamed and kicked. There's a lot of "win or die" mentality there.
If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
That's not really being competitive. You're not competing against the people in your squad.
Competitiveness and zero sum thinking is so bad in the world of video games, that Helldivers 2's entire run has been marred by over-balancing loadouts in an explicitly coop, PvE game, where balance shouldn't even be a priority.
They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE
ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count.
This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency.
So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika.
They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update.
Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
Helldivers 2 over-tuned because they wanted to keep things in the difficulty levels they envisioned, and people were simply vocal because they wanted a power fantasy. Space Marines 2 delivered on that desire better than Helldivers 2 did.
I don't think I've ever seen a game company ever manage to put 100% of their changes in a CHANGELOG.
FromSoftware games like to put in cheese border-line bullshit mechanics to make you feel good when you overcome them, even if you have to cheese them yourself. They knew everybody was going to cheese regardless of the difficulty they just made a round-about way of making you feel like it was okay.
Some people like competitiveness in games, and like difficult games, and thats okay if you do or don't. Games need to find a product-market fit just like anything else.
Part of this goes back to skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) systems becoming the standard. It used to be I would just play Counter-Strike on a local server because it had the best ping, by far. The same people were playing there all the time, so there was a sense of community, and I could really see myself improve over time in the stats and match results. With SBMM I get punished for playing better by getting matched against harder and harder opponents so that it feels like treading water, even in "unranked" game modes. SBMM is also an abusable system, as dedicated players will often make several accounts to play on and take advantage of their assumed lack of skill as their matchmaking rank is calibrated, throwing the whole thing out of whack.
Couch co-op games are the kind I'm most interested in. I want to play games with my family and friends.
Do aRPGs count?
They can be as competitive or as casual as you like, are "soft-multiplayer", essentially single player inside a multiplayer economy, and the better ones are non-p2w.
One factor not talked about enough is that multiplayer games are kind of limited in the "experience" you can create. Single player experiences are unbound. The fact that you can narrate "stories" is what allows gamers to "experience" new things.
Yeah, almost every multiplayer-focused game nowadays seems to be trying to be the next big e-sport. There's always somebody who's fully focused on the meta and being competitive, and lashing out at people who don't. I have too much work , too much social life and too many hobbies, I'm not going to spend even more time gittin gud for internet strangers.
I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
Nintendo has the right idea with avoiding any kind of group or voice chat in Splatoon and Mario Kart. Those are always fun online multiplayer experiences for me.
Maybe I'm just old and washed but it seems like kids these days take multiplayer games way more seriously. Instead of hopping on and playing a few games after school/work people act more like they are trying to make the college sports team. The amount of time and effort required to hold you own has gone up dramatically.
Because they are, at least some of them. E-sports has opportunity for making money in ways that some people are never going to have. There's also the entire ability of streaming and earning by doing that stuff. Game promoters paying out to have IAPs pushed as well.
All of this never existed in mine or your days when our parents just knew that video games would ruin us with no way of making money in them. Even the dream of becoming a game developer wasn't even a thing.
You know those after-school math tutoring academies that pop up in American strip malls? One of those opened up near me, but instead of grilling your kids in calc or trig to improve their SAT scores, it's an "esports academy" for young hopefuls.
I think there's more going on culturally than just that. Regular sports got more competitive at a younger age, too, and there has always been the possibility of going pro and earning money from it, plus college scholarships.
That's just progression of the world. The first video game was a simple thing like Pong. Now, we have entire immersive 3D worlds. Someone/something is always the first, but those that come after will/can be bigger, better, faster. The first mass produced car was a Model-T, now we have Mustangs, GTXs, Porsches, blah blah.
Not sure how old you are, but I'm around 30, started playing against others back when CS1.5 was launched, and we participated in our LAN party. It was before I had 24/7 internet connection at home, so after and before school was spent practicing with bots, then once a quarter or something we could play against each other, seeing who had "trained" the best since last time.
Already at that point many of my friends were pretty competitive, even though neither of us really had the means to become HeatoN even if we tried. I think this must have been early 2000s something I think?
There was a competitiveness to it, but it was a fun friendly competitiveness. The kind of competitiveness you have when you go bowling with friends, or play poker. You're trying your hardest to win, sure, but also: it's just fun with friends.
These days "play online" so often means "play with complete strangers you've never talked to before and most likely never will again".
Even for large popular games like Unreal Tournament you typically joined a set of favourite servers, and had the same set of "regulars" hanging around.
It's like old-school relatively small-scale forums vs. reddit or Twitter.
You can still kind-of get this experience if you try hard enough, but it's not really the default and typically nothing is geared towards it.
The thing is that most people who want a more casual multiplayer experience now just have their own servers or play in some other setting where it's easy to just play with your friends and nobody else. They'll play on a private Valheim/Minecraft server, or party up in Warzone or Fortnite, or play a private Civ game hosted p2p, or just visit each other in Animal Crossing. I think in general this is where Gen-Z is moving: less engagement with open platforms, more with private ones. That is why Discord is such a big deal as well. The problem with the current state of the internet is that if you let just anyone in you have to deal with trolls, or bots, or scammers, or incels, or whatever, and nobody wants to deal with that. Even on public chess servers you'll get like five messages a month saying "your opponent was cheating, sorry about that," who actually wants to talk to randos these days?
Back in late 90s that level of competitiveness was there, but was relegated to clans / guilds. Algorithmic match play changed all that because casual play no longer allowed regulars to get to know each other. It made casual competitiveness possible and together with popularity / normalization, many things changed.
As an aside I miss the old days, but i also found grinding overwatch and eventually leveling up in my mid 30s (pre kids) to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in spite of the unmanaged toxicity. I don't have any competitive gamer friends and the match play i dislike also made it possible to experience something i think i would not otherwise have had access to.
1.5 came out in 2002, then 1.6 in 2003.
(And Heaton is a dick, just saying.)
The problem is that every modern online game does not allow custom hosted servers. In the good old days of online multiplayer, I would load into a Halo 1 map with 30 other people set to capture the flag (a multiplayer mode that seems to almost not exist anymore!) where the server runs 24/7, and if either side wins, the same players get mixed into two new teams in a "balancing" way, and the game just starts back up. Most people were playing because "I just want to shoot someone" was fun on it's own.
This made online games essentially a public place, where people might even get to know each other and "hang out", and you could join the same people day after day, get to know habits, make friends and rivals, etc. It was extremely low competitiveness, and nothing that happened really mattered. It didn't matter if you sucked or were amazing, because you would likely end up on the team with everyone in the server at some point, so people got wildly different gameplay experiences. This even meant that different servers could target different styles of play. You could go to the really tryhard team deathmatch servers with carefully balanced maps and active admin management for cheaters and balance purposes, or you could join the match on cramped Beaver Creek with zero shields and infinite shotguns and rockets, where average lifespan was measured in tenths of seconds, but that chaos was a great breather if you didn't feel competitive that day.
No matter how shitty you were, you could find a community that felt right to you, and you were likely to even dominate occasionally when you had good days and got lucky, so that even people who suck at the game felt the high of victory.
Nowadays, game devs insist not being utterly steamrolled by minute thirty is "not fun", and enforce near perfect a perfect 1:1 win/loss ratio through matchmaking systems, where you never see the same player twice, so they don't exist as fellow humans in your mind but as hostile "agents" that you must struggle against, and everyone feels average because your instantaneous success is basically driven by who got the advantage in the random matchmaking process. Everyone is forced to feel average about their performance, because everyone is forcibly given an average experience.
A lot of that existed long before now, but it was always opt-in. If you wanted custom servers, you could go have that fun and chaos, but if you were feeling competitive, you could jump into matchmaking and have the enforced global balance of that system give you specific matches you were emotionally prepared for and explicitly seeking out.
BUT..... companies had to get rid of custom servers, because it's way harder to sell digital items for a game if players can just go on private and custom servers that turn off or disable the checks for if you have "purchased" whatever skin you want to wear. All the bullshit A/B testing and metrics companies have made up to assure us that "people like this better" is just to defend their business strategy.
A lot more games are structured that way.
I got into online gaming with Cs 1.6 and cs:cz normal online was kinda competitive but you had a lot of joke maps or non competive ones(climbing maps). I don't think they're as popular now since a lot of games have matchmaking and ranked unlocks as the default multilayer. I'm way out of the loop mind you, I learn a lot more to PvE multilayer now(left4dead and deep rock)
I think a lot of players are also tired of games that are only fun with in-app purchases. I avoid any game now that has in-app purchases because it might be a great game where you can buy fancy hats but why would I waste any time trying to find that rare gem amidst all the pay-2-win sewage out there.
I think cosmetics and other in app purchases have a generational divide. I have no clue why people would throw real money on a skin, I just never got that perspective. Meanwhile if you go to some reddit thread on some new game you can see a bunch of gen z users talking about how they feel about the cosmetics, expecting there to be more or better cosmetics, wishing for more cosmetics as paid DLC, as if that is a compelling selling point of the game to have some good cosmetics to look at. It definitely seems like a bit more vain generation compared to the millennials in terms of the clothes and accessories so maybe that checks out with everything else.
My kid has friends whose families are not all that well-off, but damn do they have a lot of paid Fortnite skins. I don't get it either.
Real life is pay2win so I have no idea why I would want more of that as an escape.
The worst part is with constant updates you can buy a game and then have it changed into pay2win later. At least with single player you might be able to keep playing the old version.
> Real life is pay2win so I have no idea why I would want more of that as an escape.
I dislike pay2win, but the logic behind that sentence could be used to rule out lots, maybe even the majority, of games..,
Not just things like Eurotruck Simulator or Farming Sim or whatever, but games in general tend to be "more of what yo get in real life, but altered". From sports games to car racing to battles fought with weapons... people do find simulated reality to be a good escape.
> people do find simulated reality to be a good escape
Yes, but those simulations are fair and not pay2win, so this isn't more of the same.
That's the great part about MTX. you can have the 1% more than make up for the 99% that opt out. And apparently the median spending on MTX is $60 as is.
So you see that and see why companies push so hard for that space. maintaining one game is also cheaper than trying to make new AAA games every 2-5 years and MP games provide a steady revenue stream. A subscription without calling it a subscription.
"But it's only cosmetics!" Is the cry of the developer.
Nope. I nope out of any of that.
No DMing, no chats? No thanks. Why play a social game you can't socialize in?
Hackers and trolls? There's zero tools for fighting them and you can't host yourself.
It's no wonder most gamers prefer single player, there's hardly any fun multi-player games.
TBF, most mobile games do indeed have chat/dm's. I'm guessing the console games don't do that because it's a logistical nightmare. A sentiment much rarer in Eastern cultures for whatever reason.
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I used to like multi-player shooters, when I was young and had infinite time to devote to "git gud." I also played games for the challenge back then. Now that I'm old, I don't have infinite time to upskill, and I mostly play games to relax and unwind after work. I specifically don't want a challenge. Unfortunately, every multi-player first person shooter seems to be geared towards (and infested with) sweaty professional gamers who do nothing but practice, and of course they wipe the floor with me.
Game companies try to solve this with so-called "skill based matchmaking[1]" which purports to match you with other players of similar skill, but I've never seen it actually work. Every game is full of sweats who somehow have cracked SBMM so that they get into games with less-skilled players like me and punch way below their weight.
I wish games would just go back to letting the user choose their own difficulty level. Sad that that's kind of gone out of fashion.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill-based_matchmaking
Are you only interested in PVP? The PVE shooters can be a lot more chill (Destiny, Division, Borderlands, Remnant, etc.)
If you get a friend or two together who don't mind oldies, the old Tom Clancy games (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell) are a blast to play through in coop too.
Will have to try them. I like shooters, but I prefer to play against push-over AI bots instead of 13 year old pro humans. I guess that's what PVE means.
> I guess that's what PVE means.
Well, sort of. PvE just means "player vs environment", a holdover/loan word from MMOs where that was the default, vs being able to attack other players in PvP areas.
When applied to shooters, though, typically it means that the game was designed around asymmetric battles between players and AI enemies. Asymmetric means that the enemies aren't just bots taking the place of humans, with the same rules, weapons, health, etc. Instead, they are usually a mix of different enemy types... easy to kill grunts, the occasional sniper, the melee berserker, and of course the "bullet sponge" bosses that take forever to kill and feel more like old MMO raids than a normal opponent in a shooter. They're not meant to simulate real players (even shitty ones), but to give more of a feel of a traditional video game campaign. For like the super-boiled-down version of this, Serious Sam is just endless hordes of enemy types running at you. A more modern take would be the roguelite shooter genre, like Risk of Rain 2 or Gunfire Reborn, which offers only endless combat and not much else. The other titles I mentioned usually have some sort of story and some form of permanent progression in the form of new weapons, abilities, etc.
If that isn't what you want, then yeah, it's bots in regular PvP shooters that you'll have to look for :( I think they are relatively rare these days, but you can still play the old Unreal Tournaments, Quakes, Doom, etc.
Worth noting that even in the FPS genre, that sort of PvE gameplay is actually the original gameplay style, that got subsumed by the massive popularity of PvP shooters later on.
Early FPSes like Wolfenstein, Doom, and the Marathon trilogy were primarily about killing asymmetric AI enemies—and even sometimes (moreso in the Marathon games) progressing through a story.
Doom had deathmatches, where you fought each other instead of the enemies. PvP in general is as old as FPS multiplayer (talking about PvE in single-player is redundant).
Sure, and so did Marathon—but they weren't yet the primary focus of the genre.
I guess I see that more as single-player vs multiplayer rather than PvE vs PvP. But I think your point is that the emphasis shifted from an entirely developer-created experience to one where other players are a major/dominant part of the experience. This shift didn't take that long, though, with multiplayer-only games becoming prevalent (Tribes, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, etc.) even before the 1990s were out, and single-player mode becoming a vestigial element even in those games that still included it before the end of the next decade.
Something else I haven't seen mentioned in the comments yet is the rapid pace of AAA title acquisitions by players. I never played as many games as my "gamer" friends, but over the last several years the pace that people pick up and put down games is staggering. Most of my friends will have acquired, played and stopped playing 4-6 games in the time it takes me to get to the oldest one in the current cycle (at which point there are no friends left who are willing to play with.)
Microsoft at least is heading towards a "Netflix for games" streaming model, which gives players very low switching costs between games in the Xbox GamePass market. I pay ~$20 per month and have rental access to a group of AAA games that would cost $1,000's to purchase.
I want to start, pause and stop my game at any point and this isn't compatible with a real-time multiplayer game.
That's not even compatible with a lot of single-player games that only allow to stop at checkpoints (because developers are lazy).
FWIW, the Switch has this and so does the SteamDeck. I'm a father of 3, 5 year old twins and a 3 year old, so it's the killer feature for me on my SteamDeck.
depends on the game, to be honest. Resident's Evil tension would be demolished if you could save in the middle of battle, or right before you turn a corner.
But also yes, modern consoles do have a suspend feature. PC's can't do it as easily because of various Windows API issues, I assume.
Well, anything can be ruined by a pause at a bad moment, but it’s great when each individual player can decide for themselves whenever their circumstances require interruption at the cost of potential experience disruption, or not.
I think it’s less about player experience, though, but more about save system complexity (how much data needs to be persisted), aka lower dev costs.
Difficulty is a factor, sure. But Console TRCs (technical requirements Checklist) are very strict on a save/load system in each game. And if you don't pass a TRC you can't ship on console (usually... I'm sure greased hands happened with certain releases).
It's complicated but also not a spot to skimp out on. So the incremental cost to design it as anytime isn't that much more than a checkpoint. Most modern games have pretty lax save systems anyway (basically anywhere that isn't a battle), so I feel it's becoming more of a moot problem.
I'm probably in the minority, as I've gotten older, I no longer enjoy single player games. I'd say most gamers have gotten pretty pissed off that we're paying for AAA titles and then still being bombarded on a game-by-game basis for battle passes (basically add-on subscriptions).
As another child mentioned dont play AAA games. AAA games budgets have gotten so big the entire project becomes about how they are going to make a profit on their $100 million cost instead of making a good game. Even if they wanted to make a good game with projects that size you get corporate management and design by committee that will always result in crap.
Stop playing AAA.
Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades, Tunic / Death’s Door… Indie is where it’s at man.
The only AAA I’ve loved in years was Red Dead 2… my horse :(
You don't even have to go full indie. There are plenty of amazing games that are maybe best described as AA instead of AAA. Let me start by recommending most of Nintendo's catalog.
This is a my-taste thing more than a their-quality thing, but it's been literal years since I've enjoyed a Nintendo-platform-exclusive title if you exclude any that were from a famous franchise that's old enough to drink good scotch. I don't have that same problem with PlayStation - there are loads of great games in between the Horizon/GOW/etc. prestige releases.
I've tried, but I just don't enjoy the PS-style "prestige" games. I want my games to above all be fun, and I just don't find the gameplay loop of the Horizons/GoWs/etc. to be very engaging. It always seems like there is more emphasis on the production values than in making sure the player is having a good time.
I own a PS5, and the absolute most fun I've had on the system is Astro Bot, followed closely by Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart. Everything else I've enjoyed has either been a PS4 game or an indie game.
A useful shorthand for my taste is that most games that fall into E-for-Everyone on the ESRB ratings scale (or even the 10+ version) are probably not something I'm particularly attracted to. There are outliers, especially since Nintendo does their best to stay family-friendly to a fault because that's their brand/history. TOTK is E10, for example, and I certainly enjoyed it, but that's the "legendary franchise" exemption bucket again.
But stuff like Astro, Splatoon, Ratchet and Clank, whatever latest Mario title, anything Rabbids or Rayman, etc. don't speak to me at all anymore. I never played R&C in any of the Playstation generations, and I never liked Crash Bandicoot when I tried that. I sort of remember liking Spyro when it was contemporary.
Given the selection bias of who publishes what games where, it's hardly a surprise to me that I'm not getting much mileage out of my Switch. Nintendo feels like a brand that's tailored most of all for my kid nephew and any appealing titles for me are largely exceptional.
To some degree I think my tastes are a response to a trend that I hated during my formative years. When the sixth generation of video game consoles came out when I was in high school (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, XBox), there was this sudden near-universal trend to make everything darker and edgier. Grand Theft Auto was making senators faint with concern, Sega gave Shadow the Hedgehog a gun and the ability to say "damn", Naughty Dog took Jak and Daxter from "Banjo-Kazooie on PS2" to "GTA-lite for edgy preteens", etc. etc. Everyone but Nintendo, who were cheerfully putting out Super Mario Sunshine, was doing it.
At the time, I was just starting to think of video games as an art form in addition to a source of entertainment, and the blatant fad-chasing I was seeing across nearly the entire industry turned my stomach. Of course the same thing had happened many times before and has happened many times since, but I wasn't in my formative years for any of those.
>t's been literal years since I've enjoyed a Nintendo-platform-exclusive title if you exclude any that were from a famous franchise that's old enough to drink good scotch.
Xenoblade and monolith as a whole has been amazing for RPGs post nintendo acquisition. And Splatoon is super popular these days (but is very MP centric).
Thing is Nintendo doesn't really need to make new franchises every other year like Sony. their new, semi-known franchises from the last decade has been Splatoon and ARMS. But they constantly reinvent their old IPs and tend to give it sufficient time to bake. Stuff like Breath of the Wild may as well have been a different franchise for what a departure it was from the Zelda formula.
Also helps they can just dig in their wine closet and bring out some untouched scotch. It can take out F Zero, Kid Icarus, Golden Sun, Warioland, Mother, and a dozen other franchises and they may as well feel new to the next generation. Sony instead abandoned all their talent and moved HQ.
Quicker games that can be easily put down and picked back up and don’t break the bank. Nintendo catered to their audience as the company grew.
As with similar complaints about film, I can only assume folks complaining that there’s nothing good because lots of the big-budget ones are lazy and bad, either didn’t look very hard, or has super-narrow taste (which is ok! Just… not a problem for me)
I can’t even come close to keeping up with the probably-good entries in either category, film or single-player(-friendly) games. They could stop making more and it would be quite a while before that was any kind of problem for me. My backlog gets a ton larger every year.
Everyone keeps talking about the death of film by superhero, but what they really mean is the death of Hollywood. There are brilliant directors working today - Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Johnathan Glazer, Lee Chang-dong, Claire Denis, Park Chan-wook, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and so many more, they just aren’t American.
Hell, plenty of good American movies come out every year, too. There are a shitload of movies released each year, even just the ones big enough to get noticed nationally or internationally, not just art projects that only play once at a local library or something. It doesn’t take a large proportion of those being good before they’re outpacing the rate at which most people watch movies, even if all that watching goes to movies released in the last year or so—me, I’m also still catching up on the thousands of good-to-great movies released in the first century+ of cinema.
Some of the good ones are even Hollywood movies. They just might not be action movies (sometimes they are!) or might not have a super-sized marketing budget, so I guess lots of folks only see the handful that get advertised heavily and figure those are the only movies, but even Wikipedia or IMDB’s list of films released each year are looooong and they don’t capture everything.
Asian media has absolutely exploded. China, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan have all put out a lot of good TV and movies in the past few years. It's definitely given me a refuge from the increasing proportion of American and British media that's crap.
Squid game was the big breakout. I liked Hell Bound.
What else should I look for?
well, Single Player games don't really have battle passes nor subscriptiosn. Some skin or expansion DLCs, but most of the popualar games are multiplayer, and most of the complaints are from multiplayer gamers.
SP games are fine for gamers outside of the $70 price increase (which I'm fine with), but apparently it's getting harder and harder to profit from SP these days. Not surprising with longer dev times, larger dev teams, and a stagnation of the console market.
Multiplayer games are fun with people you already know. (In person LAN party optional but recommended.)
Though so are plenty of single player games.
"Hitting a few singles and doubles beats trying to hit a home run and striking out."
As game developers and publishers have consolidated into mega corps this line just isn't true anymore. You need a billion dollar game to move the corporate needle these days. It's a very similar dynamic to what has happened in Hollywood. All the mid-budget projects are being squeezed out and you either go very low budget/indie or you go huge budget and swing for the fences. There is no career reward in the current corporate marketplace for modest wins.
Does what the article is arguing make any sense? AAA studios cancelled some live service games and that means fewer single player games made.
But it doesn't follow that the live service aspect is what killed the games. Games are cancelled all the time.
And then saying there's an industry trend but what's brought up is how those games were cancelled, not brought down by the user sentiment of live services.
And their data point is a 53% preference? It just seems poorly argued to me.
The headline is a bit of a dogwhistle, capitalizing on deep held sentiment among gamers, that unfortunately doesn't bear out in the market. I think many have pointed out that there are excellent smaller single player indies, but the risk to create an expensive single-player only game has become too great for most developers. It is very similar to the current state of cinema -- where people say they prefer different kinds of or better movies, but they only reliably turn out for sequels and superhero movies.
I think the mistake being made is instead of opting to build a cheaper, higher quality single player games they opt to created an expensive, AAA live service (for a minute they were calling them Destiny killers) -- which is a tough landing to stick. You'll notice that the success stories took long investments Fortnite's pivot from a grindy co-op game to a genre defining battle royale or maybe even Apex's stealth development and launch.
Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim. So the question these studios have to ask is "can I make a game that will get people to put down Skyrim or Civ V." That's a big ask.
>Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim
you don't even need a study, just check out Steam's most played games as of this posting:
- DOTA 2 is #3, PUBG is right under it.
- Rust is 5.5 years old and #9. Apex is a bit newer but still #10.
- Baldur's Gate 3 is a single player game over a year old (and AFAIK, it's major updates are finished), and today is still top 15.
- and of course GTA V is still #11, a game that has now spanned 3 generations.
When you make a big game, it captures people for a very long time. That's what companies are trying to do when they chase Fortnite.
"Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games."
I've long tried not to buy every console, because it gets expensive for no good reason. So as our Switch is aging, I metaphorically poked my head up and put my finger to the wind... and decided our "next console" is the Steam Deck I already owned. And a big part of that decision is new games are frankly not any better than old games. They look better, and that's it, and that often comes at the cost of the real interactivity of the game anyhow.
I wouldn't put a specific date on it, but game tech basically plateaued 10-15 years ago, even if the numbers keep going up. The graphics were good enough, especially if strong art direction knew how to use them. The tech for creating great games was basically all in place, and we got to where having 10 times the polygons just wasn't important anymore. Games are a lot more like movies to me now... I don't sit there looking at "was this movie 2021 or 2023?" as if that's going to indicate an important difference in quality, and games are getting to be that way for me.
It's consultant bullshit research, not even doing proper science. For example it talks about the popularity of PvP--the actual argument it wants to say is, companies should develop single-player games because existing PvP games are locked in to an audience already. Which makes the title completely misleading and a clever/unscrupulous consultant might say such a sweeping statement to get access to companies' interest.
I've spent a lot of time lately playing a game called Ravenfield. It has replaced CS2 as my main game. The graphics are bad, it's purely single player, the AI is not great, but it allows for large scale battles with none of the pain of playing against other people. Mods are free and there are tons, with new ones created weekly. No need to pay for upgrades or game packs or seasons or crates.
What do you mean "graphics are bad" in Ravenfield? It's not photorealistic, but it's a game. Tetris is also not photorealistic. But it's a great game about plastic soldier figures using plastic toy battle gear to play an actual plastic war.
Ravenfield is silly fun. The slowmo is so great for power fantasies.
An extremely old build (that still demonstrates the core gameplay) is available on itch.io if anyone is unsure that they might like it.
The dev is doing some weird anime campaign that they seem to be heavily invested in, but I don't really care. I paid for the game I wanted long ago.
We prefer same/shared screen co-op (Diablo 3 and 4, A Way Out, etc.), and story campaign PvE co-op (e.g. Wildlands, BG3).
Shared screen co-op is annoyingly difficult to find since "couch co-op" doesn't differentiate split screen versus shared screen and we strongly dislike split screen.
Story co-op is increasingly difficult to find. When you do find them, they tend to be less campaign or story and more "repeated encounter" scenarios (e.g., Insurgent). There is nothing like the strategically deliberate plan and work together pace of Wildlands since Wildlands.
Worse, recent co-op campaign games tend to be add-on modes to PvP, meaning you have to contend with ridiculous "balance" boosts and nerfs so nothing works like it should if it was a single player game. PvE should not be "balanced" this way.
If you didn't already try "It Takes Two" then you owe it to yourselves to try, although I don't know off the top of my head if it's playable as shared-screen.
It definitely ticks the "co-op story" game box though, and is overall a great game.
Some co-ops are very confusing to me.
Like for Pikmin where in the later editions there were multiple main characters on the field that you could switch between. How was there not a local co-op where each player could use a main character?
If you liked BG3, have you tried the Divinity Original Sin series by the same studio? They're even better in co-op IMO and not being limited to the D&D rules makes combat more fun and dynamic.
Online games are like DRM. You need third party servers and internet connection to run it. You can lose your profile if provider/developer choose it. You are forced to accept every updates.
Chances, that you'll deal with problems and unwilling changes are higher than just start an offline single-player game.
That's why I buy games exclusively on gog.com.
Single player games are always how they were, you are running local software after all. If anything they get better with time with bug fixes and community mod ecosystems that continue to improve and overhaul the experience.
Multiplayer games are of course not strictly local software, but their experience extends beyond software itself into forming an abstract community of people. You might come on to a multiplayer game and enjoy it for a time, but its in its nature that this community will shift. The casuals move on to newer titles that have all the other casuals on it now. The greybeards left playing halo 3 today are total sweats now who stomp you every time you have a happy memory of getting a killstreak 15 years ago and foolishly open master chief collection.
> Single player games are always how they were, you are running local software after all.
Balance fixes (yes, in single player games) show that this is not always the case. Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring have both had several gameplay tactics nerfed.
I'm actually considering going back to world of warcraft because some of the new features allow you to experience the previously multiplayer required portions on your own.
As a lifelong and avid gamer, multiplayer games - in my experience, at least - typically trend toward highly toxic, abusive, sometimes degenerate behavior. Communities in which this does not happen seem to be quite rare (I can't recall one offhand). Trolling is rampant, cheating/exploitation is normal, and elitism is pervasive. It really takes the fun out of games.
These days, I generally avoid games that are multiplayer-only, and for games with multiplayer elements, I try to avoid those and focus on single-player elements instead.
It could be selection bias based on my gaming preferences, of course, but based on feedback I've heard from others who play games that I do not, it seems to be largely the same everywhere multiplayer is involved.
In my experience, ONE thing will cause a game to trend towards toxicity - higher stakes. The more "important" the win or loss feels to the player, the more toxicity shows up.
It's pretty easy to filter out "toxic" games if you filter out anything which has a ranked mode and is not designed to be played infinitely.
Unfortunately, games in the online era have trended in that direction, because they are the most profitable.
For example, some variables that affect toxicity: - competitiveness, often implemented by sort of ranked system, but also just any sort of head-to-head competition. Tournaments and betting will do this as well. - longer investment (via playtimes, either of a single "run" or in total) - people won't get mad at a 5-10 minute game as much as a 1 hour game. Games as a service like MMOs where people have 1000s of hours of playtime are the extreme end of this. - punishing gameplay, where a mistake can cause you to lose a lot of progress (Hardcore modes where dying means you have to restart your character, for example) - tone (casual vs serious tone, e.g. Fall Guys vs Call of Duty) - More serious generally results in more toxicity.
Adjusting these variables can even turn a single player game into a toxic one (e.g. self-imposed challenges/achievements, Dark Souls, Jump King or Getting Over It).
Similarly, you can lower the stakes so that the gameplay doesn't devolve into toxicity, even with multiplayer (e.g. Animal Crossing)
> It could be selection bias based on my gaming preferences
Major factor IME. If you're playing any AAA or one of the top-10-or so FPSes or MOBAs, sure. Hanging out with friends when they're playing online multiplayer less in-fashion older and indie games: Very little of that if any, there.
I'm with you, but to make a (competely arbitrary) parallel: It's possible to love R&B music but still have a miserable time when you go to a concert with The Weeknd because you don't vibe with the crowd and you think the party sucks. That doesn't mean you can't have a good time going out to live shows in general and find parties you enjoy with people you vibe with.
Similarly, I love clubbing but have absolutely 0 interest going to any of the major couple of venues that catch the bigger crowds in town.
Doesn't mean the party scene is dead.
From "Uncovering the Viral Nature of Toxicity in Competitive Online Video Games" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00978
"Abstract: Toxicity is a widespread phenomenon in competitive online video games. In addition to its direct undesirable effects, there is a concern that toxicity can spread to others, amplifying the harm caused by a single player’s misbehavior. In this study, we estimate whether and to what extent a player’s toxic speech spreads, causing their teammates to behave similarly. To this end, we analyze proprietary data from the free-to-play first- person action game Call of Duty®: Warzone™. We formulate and implement an instrumental variable identification strategy that leverages the network of interactions among players across matches. Our analysis reveals that all else equal, all of a player’s teammates engaging in toxic speech increases their probability of engaging in similar behavior by 26.1 to 30.3 times the average player’s likelihood of engaging in toxic speech. These findings confirm the viral nature of toxicity, especially toxic speech, in competitive online video games."
You can also add DDoS to the list too. Ive been long DooM player but I stepped back due to above crap and DDoSes on my servers. Now I play mostly offline, ocassioanlly spawning server for friends only.
Deep Rock Galactic is supposed to have one of the most wholesome and helpful communities out there.
I wish I enjoyed that game, but it just felt like a grind to me. :-(
I really enjoyed PvP and PvE shooters with my friend group in secondary school (that's 11 to 18 or so), but I don't get the same feeling with people I don't know. I do some occasionally with other friends but it's just not the same as it was then.
My taste in games has changed too as I've gotten older - I find myself mostly playing a mix of older games, story rich RPGs and indie titles - eg things like Tyranny, Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, OpenTTD, Rimworld, Slay the Spire... twitchy FPS games just don't do it for me any more.
So this article's main findings (the splits by age) definitely fits with me - I'm out of the <25 age group and have been for a while ;)
I don’t game at all these days. I think the last games I played were Overwatch and LoL around 2018.
Speaking as my 2018 self, I grew quickly bored of single player games and felt most were not worth the money. Pay $60 and maybe get a week or two’s worth of entertainment. I was never into replaying static content or grinding for meaningless badges or trophies.
Meanwhile multiplayer games have significantly more dynamic playtime for the money.
I can’t speak for the state of gaming in 2024 though.
Yeah, nowadays people like you are amortized by people paying hundreds for skins. So it's basically a win-win if you aren't tempted to spend on battle passes or skins or whatnot.
But that causes more outrage on social media, even though the wisdom statistics state that the top 10% spenders can make up half the revenue of a game.
Can an apparent preference for Online PvP amongst 16-19 age cohort be explained by a lack of disposable income? Online PvP games are often free (with different monetization schemes), so that removes one large barrier to entry?
It's certainly possible. We're approaching a generation of gamers that may have never actually had to spend on games, nor ask their parents to get them GTA for Christmas. That kind of market may never even consider the idea of buying a game outright, even when they do get dispoable income.
Many reasons for this:
Online gaming used to be about having fun. And while those communities definitely still exist, the landscape is dominated by "competitive" gaming that brings out the worst in people.
The relentless pushing of "battle passes," in-gaming loot crate gambling, and in-game upgrades using real-life money from game publishers.
There's also the whole "you can't pause real life" thing. Much easier to play online when you're young and don't have real responsibilities - but that's not a luxury most adults have.
and sadly many reasons industry will continue to chase multiplayer.
- higher spending cap. for minimal effort you can refresh battle passes and other monetization post launch. Making DLC for a single player game still takes effort to design and polish. And despite online protest, a lot of people clearly buy these.
- longevity. Single player games have the same curves as ever where they make big sales in the first few months and peter out to a trickle by the time it's out for a year. And these are games that take multiple years to make at the AAA level.a successful MP game can run for years and merely iterate instead of re-invent entire campaigns and character designs.
- external events/ads. some top games try to do an e-sports gauntlet to engage people and further cement their brand. they can release 3rd party skins to bring up player numbers. They can benefit more from streamers. At best, a SP game can try some collaboration content, which is much larger scale and may not create much buzz.
When I got Batman Arkham Asylum it had Games for Windows Live required. I didn't want an account online or "live" scoreboard, at the time you could choose local only as an option.
Imagine my surpise when GfWL lost all my save games halfway through. Why? Who knows. Maybe an GfWL update? Maybe a game update? I severely reduced my gaming after that and have been adamant for true standalone games only (thank you GOG games).
Note: I do not mind multiplayer online games. I have been known to play DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online) off and on.
The problem with most perpetual multiplayer games is that they are potentially limitless time sinks. They are often inherently addictive with no natural end or resolution to them. Of course there are single player games that do this too, so it's not the only differentiator.
In contrast, single player campaigns (or co-op campaigns for that matter) are often story driven. They have a beginning and an end. They offer catharsis. If it's good, you may play through it again, but it will end eventually.
Yeah, different taste. You can see a few here argue that $60 for a single player game is not worth the value. Some want that sink to come back to and sink a few hours into. Some are pretty free upfront, so their monetary investment can even be $0, amortized by whales.
I think the push for multiplayer games made me quit gaming about 10-15 years ago. It was only in the last couple years that the new Zelda games got me back into it, which are single player.
I will sometimes play multiplayer games with my nephews, but would always prefer to play by myself. If I'm playing a game I want it to be fun and not stressful. When everything is a competition, it's stressful. There's not letting up, no lazy laps... you have to try to win.
They often want me to play Minecraft with them. I "forget" to bring my laptop a lot. When I played Minecraft in the past it was always on peaceful and I'd just build stuff. It was a giant sandbox of digital legos for me, or I'd try and make weird stuff with redstone. They have all these monsters turned on, want to go into these boss battles, and they never give me any weapons (and disable my ability to get my own) so I just die over and over again trying to run from things with no defenses. It's awful. Half the time I just stop playing and stare the the screen, like wtf do you want me to do here...
I'm sure the industry hates the idea that most people prefer single players games, because then they can't justify their online services, so they are incentivized to push multiplayer games and make people think that's what they like.
I also gave up on multiplayer and casually playing on Nintendo Switch has got me back into it. For me, it's a skill issue. I'm just not as good as I used to be. I play games on easy now so that I can blast through it quickly. Otherwise I'll (have to) set the game down for a couple weeks and completely forget what was going on in the game.
I have the complete opposite experience with Minecraft. My kids play peaceful flat land creative and it's the most boring thing to me. I'll take boss fights without weapons any day.
> I have the complete opposite experience with Minecraft. My kids play peaceful flat land creative and it's the most boring thing to me. I'll take boss fights without weapons any day.
Flat land creative is boring. I agree with you there. I would use a normal world and explore it a bit, find a good spot to make my home, mine for materials, create a store room for all of stuff getting mined, make secret entrances that would trigger with pistons and stuff, things like that. I guess some people might find that boring too, but I found it pretty relaxing. Of course this was usually just something to do on the side, while something else was going on. As a singular focus I won't do it.
I used to work a job with a lot of downtime, so it was perfect for that. Something to fill the time, but easy to pick up and put down as needed, and I could still keep an eye on what was going on at work to know if I needed to do something.
LOL your nephews are trolls.
For sure... The one was being a jerk, so I was just threw it right back at him and started destroying the whole settlement he built. Emptying his chests into lava breaking down walls... to see how he likes playing with a griefer.
It was somewhat effective.
Minecraft has the distinction of being the only game I've played with my kids where I still felt like a parent even in the game. It wasn't even just policing "bad behavior", sometimes I had to run around covering over the ravines so they wouldn't fall in, because then I had to go rescue them. Now they're older and I still had to sometimes go rescue them after they made an ill-considered journey without supplying well enough in advance.
I'm not complaining per se. It's just interesting that the game is able to have that dynamic in it.
They're older now, it's much less of an issue, but I still mandate that PvP stays off at all times. Though it is a useful lesson in the mechanics of escalation, I suppose.
(Specifically, you always value harm to yourself more than you value harm to others, even your family, so when someone does "1" damage to you, you perceive it as "2", then you try to retaliate with "2" damage but they perceive it as "4" damage for the same reason, and now you're stuck in an escalating loop. There are ways out of this loop, of course, but it takes time. This rather simple model explains a rather distressing amount of international politics and history....)
Knowing a couple commands, and having them switched on, can be helpful for the ravine issue. The /tp command can be used to teleport a player (your kid) to where your player is.
My nephews of course would use this against me. I’d get away into a calm area and they’d teleport me right into the middle of hell.
I'm an early-internet player, but I used to really enjoy games like KingsOfChaos, Outwar, Neopets and Runescape (OG version, or 2007 reboot).
It sounds weird, and not what most people would consider as "gaming" but all of those were a mix of solo & coop since they had a social aspect but totally playable alone (well, KingsOfChaos would be kind of silly to play alone).
It seems like only the OG runescape still has some sort of following, the other ones died out (there was a different one with space ships and planets and power levels, but I forget the name - same principle as Outwar and KingsOfChaos).
There was also a Russian one based on the Dozory universe (Night Watch) by Sergey Lukianenko (one of my favorite authors), but that mostly turned into a cash grab which is a bummer because it's one of the coolest game concepts out there - it has been my dream that someone actually makes that game.
My gaming time is split between online PVP fighting games (Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive) and single-player games (Elden Ring, Yakuza). If I had to pick one, I'd go with single player.
The online experience is great compared to even a few years ago (when it wasn't acceptable), but not perfect in terms of loading times and lag.
A few years ago? People have been playing Counter Strike professionally for like 20 years.
I said I play Street Fighter, not Counter Strike. Netcode (needs and implementation) is actually not the same between all games.
Seems the first Street Fighter game with rollback netcode was in 2008, another in 2011.[1] But perhaps the implementation was poor? I'm not a fighting game expert.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO
These were rereleases of fairly old games (i.e. niche titles, where most of the people were just playing on emulators). It's also not enough to have rollback netcode, it still needs to be implemented properly, the game needs to have good matchmaking, etc. These weren't new, mainstream releases.
This is why I feel fighting games pretty much left the western scene. It's a very stringent fanbase but not necessarily one that will pay more than some shooter game.
Which is ironic given that Asian games have the biggest whales, but Asia was always 2 steps ahead with lootboxes. The skins in SF6 look great, but they are definitely banking on the fact that <5% of the active players will even consider buying them.
Yeah that's fair. I've been playing some GG Strive recently and compared to how it used to be playing fighting games online, 50/50 you're either against a pleb or Leffen, it's been nice to have somewhat consistent matchmaking in terms of skill. It does fuck it up from time to time though.
My brain has a switch. I either want to try-hard or I want to relax. Try hard mode means I'm playing competitive multiplayer (cs2 is my current poison). Relax mode means I'm playing something single-player and easy. Unfortunately, this makes it so I pretty much can't play dark souls, souls-likes, or any other single player games that advertise as "hard". When I'm in relax mode, I have zero desire to run my head against a wall over and over just to continue a story or world exploration. I wish more games had a mode like "Another Crab's Treasure" where you can simply press a button to kill the boss (there's an option to "give Kril a gun" in the settings).
> When I'm in relax mode, I have zero desire to run my head against a wall over and over just to continue a story or world exploration.
Exactly. Real life has enough "repeated failure despite best effort." Why would I want more of it in a video game I play for enjoyment?
Maybe because I'm old (and have a job and a family), but I don't like online games because of availability issues.
If I'm playing online, I prefer to play with my friends (not strangers). Arranging time so everyone is available is very difficult.
I do miss LAN parties.
Please just give me back my OG mass effect, og warcraft, StarCraft, monkey islands, kings quests that I can play on my own and has a good story. I don't want of the crappy mmo nonsense. One can dream!
... There are plenty of those kind of games being sold and developed, though.
I only play single player stuff and have a backlog that just keeps increasing, I can't keep with the pace. They aren't the most publicized AAA titles though (BG3 probably bring an exception given its popularity, and the Zeldas thanks to Nintendo).
It's just like music, where there's plenty of good one being made, but can't be found anywhere close to the top 10 hits or on radio (at least, for the kind of music I like).
So yeah... One can dream, but the dream is, for once, alive (mostly thanks to GoG, Steam and Humble).
I wonder to what degree the business and bureaucratic dynamics of big-budget failed live-service games are similar to big-budget Hollywood flops. The people working on it day to day know that it's crap and will not succeed, but someone in the background[0] keeps pushing the project forward anyway.
What's the disconnect? If dozens or hundreds of people intimately familiar with the project say it's no good, why don't you listen to them?
[0] in my mind's eye, mustachioed, smoking a cigar, and fanning himself with hundred-dollar bills
Most of my gaming now is honestly FreeCell on my phone, but if we want to talk about what "gamers" would consider games, the only time I really enjoy multiplayer is if I'm playing with actual friends.
I never really had much enjoyment with playing with strangers on the internet. Most of them are much better at these games than I am, and it's just way too stressful. I also have some hesitation trash-talking total strangers, but I'm perfectly fine doing that with close friends.
Multi player co op or single player in that order… there is no 3
I played MP when I was younger (even MMOs, played WoW in the first year), but nowadays, it’s all single player. Stellaris, Civ V, and the two Owlcat Pathfinder Games (Wrath of the Righteous, which I was playing when I saw the link, and Kingmaker) are my main games where I have over 1k hours each, but I also play many other single player games. I don’t like always having to push myself to the max, or interacting with random internet people when I want to enjoy myself.
An obvious explanation for why publishers overwhelming focus on multiplayer titles despite consumer demand is that multiplayer games are much harder to pirate
Maybe? Seems like more and more publishers are trying to sneak in a required internet connection for single player.
Everyone is trying to build AAAA "live service" games because fortnite and friends made a gazillion dollars. They did that by essentially being a very new experience (no, shitty arma mods do not count, they were so clunky you have to be a special kind of patient and weird to enjoy them), so everyone tried it, and that meant they could capture almost any whale, and Epic eventually figured out you could milk literal children and whales for all of their money, because kids will bully each other into buying freaking character skins that used to be just an unlockable or option in multiplayer gaming
The problem is that, to properly milk the whales, you have to follow specific strategies that encourage their "I'm better than you because I paid $100 instead of wasting 100 hours" mentality, which means you have to make it suck to not be a whale so that the whales can feel so superior, and to help drive potential whales into entering their payment info and becoming milkable whales.
That means that non-whale players, the majority, have to treat the game as a part time job just to keep up with released content (which is partially enforced by the game or community) or else just not get to experience the majority of the game. The game requires more effort per unit of "fun" you want to experience because it has to in order to trigger the whale catching effects.
However, most people only have time in their life for one of these part time jobs, including the whales, which means the market is fixed. There's only enough player time and whale money to support a small, fixed number of these games. That's why they keep failing, there are strong network effects, and nobody wants to "invest" in a new game.
I just really miss split screen.
It's a lot harder to make a single player game have depth and complexity than it is for a multi player game, since you don't have human opponents.
Single player is a different kind of experience, and no less valuable. You might as well say
> It's a lot harder to make a book have depth and complexity than it is for going to a party, since you don't have human conversation partners.
It depends on the book and the party. Similarly, maybe there is more depth and complexity to Dwarf Fortress than there is to Rocket League. (Not to pick on RL in particular, it is just the first thing that came to mind.)
I'd say Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom had a lot of depth. There was a ton of stuff to do. I have 340 hours into Tears of the Kingdom and hit 100% on the map, but there are still things I haven't done and stuff to explore and try. I find they also have a high replay value, since they are so open and there are nearly infinite ways to solve the various puzzles, traverse the world, or engage in the various battles... or don't. I once started up a new BotW game to see how far I could get without actually fighting anything.
I’d say it’s the opposite. But you are probably talking about depth of combat skill, while I’m talking about depth of writing and story.
I think it's highly dependent on the type of game. Games that involve planning and strategy like Slay the Spire or Factorio have enormous depth despite being single player. But I think that it's hard to make the actual execution of mechanics as fun or deep against computer opponents.
While I don't doubt that this is true, it also seems like the very biggest games at a given time tend to be multi-player. DOTA, Fortnite, WoW were all so genre-definingly huge that there are lists of copycats a mile long. Maybe the only comparable single-player-only game I can think of, in the last 20 or so years at least, is Dead Souls / Dark Souls.
This sums it up for me.
"I Don't Want To Be A Product Of My Environment. I Want My Environment To Be A Product Of Me."
Frank Costello - The Departed.
Don't we all, here? Don't we (most of us) engineer? Is this still "Hacker" news?
(Although I do not quite grasp the intended relation of the idea to gaming. I would say it's a matter of one's own private time with oneself, one's own rhythm...)
>I do not quite grasp the intended relation of the idea to gaming
MP games play on a server that updates to its desire. you like that cool gun? it can be nerfed tomorrow. Like this strategy? well, competitive gamers can hard counter it and kill you every time. you can "take a break" by getting a good night's rest and fall in rankings overnight.
Single player games can be played on your time, your way, and (most) glitches/exploits you may find won't be patched out one day. Some games even added back in some glitches on behalf of speedrunners' requests. Even linear games can have you craft your own experience on what you did when and how you reacted. It's "your" experience. But a shared enough experience that everyone can relate and talk about it. a year 1 pvp meta may be ancient history to a year 3 meta.
That's what I took out of it.
I love playing multi-player games when there is a well built economy. Frankly, that economy doesn't even need to be built into the game. I've played multi-player games where the marketplace was outside the game (but still all done with in-game items).
What I hate about multi-player is when you have to play the game with others to be successful (exceptions made for those very few big bosses). I'm mostly a MMORPG player. I don't want to be in a clan or guild. I don't want to find other people to play with. I just want to log on whenever I want and play for as long or as little as I want. But, I want to be able to buy stuff in an economy.
IMHO because of toxic online interactions and a lack of couch co-op titles.
The competitive shooters have been destroyed by cheaters. In the long term, and even the short term, cheats beat anticheat. That's why co-ops like Helldivers 2 are popular now.
Most gamers are casual and are over the age of 20 and can’t dedicate hours of their lives to maintaining a decent standard in online play
My feeling is that there are basically three reasons for the focus on multiplayer:
* cheap out on development: essentially just have a few low detail maps that people play constantly
* people want to look “unique” so you can charge them for near-zero-cost assets
* people don’t complain when you say “must have an internet connection”
All of which are garbage reasons to me and just mean fewer good games, and less reason to buy them (I’m uninterested in buying a game if it is just going to stop working in a year because they’re no longer selling it).
If I want to be subject to swearing and shitty behavior is just become a high school teacher.
Add to this the appeal of a live service model:
* Committed playerbase that stays around for a long time
* Dev time focused on making new assets and gamemodes etc. rather than needing to develop entire new games
* Designed with an intentional grind (leveling systems, battle passes, random drop chances) which slows down player progression to acquire before-mentioned aesthetic items or even mechanically important upgrades, can provide shortcuts via payment
Of course, new live services are sinking now because each one depends on attention economy. If potential players are already committed to a different live service, they don't have the time or interest to re-commit to some other new one.
We've been watching for years now as major companies sink millions into games that are DOA because they never actually had an audience willing to commit to yet another major continuing time investment that these games represent.
I think the real reason for focus on multiplayer is that it keeps the game fresh without things that are really half-baked like procedural world gen. That drives engagement- keeping people playing- which gives companies more opportunities to sell microtransactions, skins, etc.
Funny, because 70-80% of my friends prefer multiplayer, because you just can spend time together, talking and playing.
And almost all single-player games have a loud and obnoxious crowd demanding multi-player.
No, we prefer single-player games that also have couch-coop but couch-coop games died.
Indeed, at max I would go for a split screen in some games, but that is about it.
I find turn based board games on BGA to be the best compromise.
Hey, if I wanted to socialize I'd go outside, am I right?!
I dont often have time for multiplayer games.. they require time at the same time as others, they are also not the sort of thing you can pause while you go stir dinner or take the bins out or whatever is actually more important.
Interestingly they don't mention singleplayer online games which are my favorites. MTG, Hearthstone, Street Fighter, Tekken etc
All the games in your list are multiplayer games though.
In my mind a multiplayer game is where I need other players to play together. WoW, Counter Strike, League of Legends etc.
In Hearthstone, MTG, SF etc I play alone, single player, against someone who might as well be a bot
If it was really single player, you could pause it. That's the easiest way to tell the difference. I prefer single player games. By which I mean games with a single player. Redefining it to mean something else just makes it harder to communicate IMO.
I have a crippling addiction to competitive FPS games unfortunately.
Small squad coop is a pretty excellent option. Helldivers 2 was super popular for a good reason; all the upsides of hanging out with a couple others folks and having a ridiculous time, facing absurd monsters. Warhammer Vermintide & Darktide lack the open level design but have similar upsides.
I do think multiplayer is super hard to make broadly rewarding. High skill players quickly come to dominate, often in brutal ways. I enjoyed some Star Wars: Battlefront 2 but man, a couple players who knows what they are doing rack up kills quick to earn a hero character respawn, & can often just own the heck out of most players quite well. Figuring out how you can drop good experiences for medium & low skill players is super hard.
multi-player is more competitive. single-player is more about the story & mechanics. they are complimentary and distinct genres of games.
I'm in my 40s and don't put in the effort to be competitive in multiplayer games. I have great admiration for the developers and the players who participate.
I mean yeah, when you make multiplayer too clean it becomes less fun.