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What is the personal value of multiplayer and single player games to you?
j0hnz3r
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've heard, more than once now, of people who will not buy Left 4 Dead because it doesn't have a good single player experience. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I've heard people decry Bioshock for not having multiplayer. I can't imagine playing either since both are profoundly wonderful experiences.
For me personally, I find myself most emotionally attached to multiplayer experiences spent with friends and single player epxeriences spent alone. Hours spent at the 7-11 playing Street Fighter. Hours spent in dorms playing Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye. Hours spent online raiding the dungeons of Azeroth. Hell, even playing Super Mario Bros with my sister, trading off when it got too hard for one of us. I suppose I value the multiplayer/communal aspect of games more than single player aspect.
What of you? Do you find the multiplayer aspect of games more compelling, the single player, or both?
For me personally, I find myself most emotionally attached to multiplayer experiences spent with friends and single player epxeriences spent alone. Hours spent at the 7-11 playing Street Fighter. Hours spent in dorms playing Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye. Hours spent online raiding the dungeons of Azeroth. Hell, even playing Super Mario Bros with my sister, trading off when it got too hard for one of us. I suppose I value the multiplayer/communal aspect of games more than single player aspect.
What of you? Do you find the multiplayer aspect of games more compelling, the single player, or both?
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I like both sides of the coin. But I really wish Fallout 3 had co-operative multiplayer. I'd love to tear shit up in the DC Wasteland with a decently intelligent buddy. :P
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Is it? I just wanted to hear people's stories on their memories of games past.
I don't think that multiplayer and single player need to be that balanced. I've played plenty of games with no multiplayer (most RPGs for example) that were fantastic and there are also plenty of games where the 1P mode is more like a warm up for the multiplayer than a mode that you would want to play seriously (Civilization Revolution being the most recent example for me). I do think that there's a definite feeling in general though that single player mode is worth more than a multiplayer mode; just look at the aforementioned Shadowrun that was panned both commercially and critically for lack of a single player mode despite being a highly entertaining multiplayer game.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
Resistance 2, f'rinstance. Why the fuck don't they have a 2-player co-op campaign mode?
I always thought Dead Space could have used a good co-op mode as well. That would have been a lot of fun.
In the long run though I usually end up picking up the single player games because I dislike online multiplayer and it's extremely rare of me to have friends over to play anything but Rock Band. Which, by the way, has both modes in perfect harmony and is a better game for it.
Also it probably doesn't help that my internet is slow and usually causes plenty of problems.
As such, unless something has good singleplayer value, I'm really not likely to get it.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
That, and I don't like to pay for services like MMO subscriptions and Gold Live memberships. Not happening. Games are pricey enough, thank you.
Edit: Also, I hate the move toward voice communication online. I don't want to hear people sing or pretend to be a commander and tell me what to do (I always purposely do the opposite even when they're right) or just be annoying and/or racist/homophobic...text is golden online.
The last game I got into the online aspect of was StarCraft. Gears 2 and Soul Calibur 4 are the local multiplayer games of choice at the moment. With StarCraft and Gears 2 they both have a good sinleplayer portion, while SC4 is the only game I have ever bought purely for the mutliplayer. And that's only because of the good times my best friend and I had with SC2.
Smash Bros. is exempt from all of the above.
Of course, this rational does not work with Nintendo.
LIZ: Different.
VOICE-OVER: It's September 24th, I'm Liz Parker and five days ago I died. But then the really amazing thing happened. I came to life.
Although, with fighting games, I prefer multiplayer, just because the AI is nearly always a cheating fuckburger that's no fun to play in nearly every fighting game. (Remember Tekken 3, Soul Calibur, or Dead or Alive 2, which had cretinous AIs that would let you get away with almost anything on Easy or Normal? Those were actually kind of fun to play in single if you had a bad day, because you could just pound their stupid heads in without falling into bad habits like using patterns or exploits. I wish fighting game makers would get over themselves and just make the AI stupid again, because almost nobody buys fighting games for single player, and they don't need it to be ass-rapingly hard to be worth buying. End rant.)
With single player games, I don't have to make appointments, or look to see who's on, or any of that. I just play when I want to, or when I can. I can get better at my leisure without having someone call me names. It's more relaxing for me.
As to morons on the internet, part of me, is actually glad for them. That anger that drives you to destroy them over and over again. I'm rarely that passionate about beating an in-game boss.
As such, games oriented around their multi-player are entirely without value to me, and I would not (and do not) purchase or play them. I tend to get 'annoyed' by people clamouring to get MP aspects added to CRPGs that are single-player because A) there are already innumerable games out there with MP, you greedy sods ( :winky: ), and
I haven't really come across too many mutli-only games, but I will say that Left 4 Dead isn't worth full price to me. That probably has more to do with wanting to see how well Valve keeps the updates going for it, though.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
I loved Bioshock, but a deathmatch with shooting bees while cool, wouldn't add anything to the package.
But I won't play L4D because from what I've seen, it's not a public MP friendly game. If I had a few friends who had it, I'd get it, but it seems to be a more intimate MP experience then say CoD4 or TF2. I could be wrong though.
But, MP can add to some games. For example, WoW, just because I had friends and family chatting in Guild Chat I would spend HOURS killing the same monster over and over hoping for a 1.3% chance of something dropping. However, FFXI seemed to be a single player game with that same mentality in mind, and I found it incredibly boring. Sometimes, all you need is a chat window.
Minesweeper is a great game by yourself. Hearts is better with other people. Certain mechanics lend themselves to being single-player games and certain mechanics... not so much.
Can you imagine a Tuftoo campaign mode?
I mean, I can, but it's horrifying. I really respect games that know what they are and they put the most effort into being good at what they are good for. CoD4 had a pretty short campaign aspect, and it was pretty fun, but it certainly wasn't even 5% of why I spent $50 on the game. The reverse is true (even more so) with Bioshock.
And as long as I have a chance to hate: I won't play Left Four Dead because survival horror is the lamest genre of anything ever. Fucking cave paintings are more interesting than "dead things will jump at you." /ranttime
Another thing that makes me mad is no available guest options in a lot of 360 online games. Halo3 has it and it was very effective. This is good marketing. I bought a 360 because of playing halo 3 as a guest on a friends 360.
PC games almost always have some kind of multiplayer and I think it has gotten away from what used to make PC games great.
Engineer: "I... I kern't go on... Spahs keep sappin' mah sentries!"
Demoman: "Ach, pull yerself together, you dust-lovin' mother of all lowlanders!"
Heavy: "Duh, wut wut?"
Pyroman: *mrph mrph*
RANDOM ENCOUNTER!!!
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
Lucky you because L4D isn't survival horror.
I generally lament how console gaming is increasingly leaning toward competitive online multiplayer. Sure, it's fine for those who love it, but I pretty much had my fill back in the old CS beta days and now can do without just fine, thank you very much. Now we have a shitload of games where most of the thought was put into the online multiplayer to the point where the majority of Achievements in the game involve it and/or the single-player campaign is somewhat an afterthought.
Luckily, this is mostly confined to shooters. Unluckily, many of the biggest games released these days are shooters.
I don't understand why so many shooters coming out now either don't have offline multiplayer at all, or it's just a poor imitation of the much superior online mode.
And now with the RE5 demo, I am super-stoked. We'll see if it really starts showing up more in the future, or if this is just a bit of an anomaly considering the past few years.
Back in my teenage years I spent a lot of time playing multiplayer in net cafes though, things like Half-life (mostly its mods, it was around the time Counter-strike was first released), Diablo 2, Starcraft, Age of Empires and Red Alert.
Multiplayer doesn't enter my mind when I am looking at a game, I am purely interested in the singleplayer experience since that is what I am going to be playing.
It has to be said though that I am a PC man, I own a PS2 yes, but I rarely play it, only have a dozen games for it, most of which are MGS, Silent Hill or Resident Evil games, with a few titles I won in contests sprinkled on top.
Except in Left 4 Dead, where I came for the multi.
:winky:
I've gotten tons of fun out of TF2, BF 1942, UT, Q3A and all the famous HL1 mods. But I also really love Majora's Mask, Bioshock, Mario Galaxy and countless other console games I've played in the past (you're kind of hard pressed to find retail PC games without multiplayer now-a-days.)
Steam id: skoot LoL id: skoot
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
But it makes sense to include co-op in most action games, both split-screen and online.
I don't have someone to play games with on a consistent basis, and I can't stand playing online for more than a half hour at a time. So single-player is perfect for me. Unless it's a game like Rock Band or Warhawk, designed ground-up for multi, then I will just sit comfortably in front of the tee-vee with a mug of hot chocolate and enjoy some vidja games.
As a result, I am increasingly disappointed by the huge focus on online multiplayer these days. Please, don't tack on a half-assed multiplayer mode. Flesh out the single player campaign more!
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
I love Gears of War 2, but neither the SP or MP elements alone would have convinced me it was worth sixty bucks. However, with both elements together, particularly the coop campaign and Horde mode, I consider the game an excellent deal. Fallout 3 is SP only, but the game has a pretty huge amount of content. I'm constantly finding new and strange things so it's well worth the 60 bucks. Left 4 Dead is focused entirely on MP and even with only a couple maps to play versus on (and the likelihood that my 360 version will never see decent support from Valve), it's still a ton of fun and something I consider well worth the money.
Then there's stuff like Fable 2. I bought the game, but the only reason I didn't take it back within a couple days is because my sister wanted to keep it. I really feel like I was ripped off for that game. The main storyline is short and uninteresting, the characters largely forgettable, and pretty much everything there is to do in the game is useless even within the game world. To make things worse, it has a tacked-on co-op mode that is nothing short of horrible. Nothing about the separate or combined elements can possibly justify how much I spent on that game. Mirror's Edge was better, but again, severely lacking in content. Some people are perfectly happy with doing speed run rehashes of bits of the campaign mode and a 4-5 hour campaign, but I just can't stomach that for sixty dollars.
Really, it boils down to whether or not the game is good enough on an hourly basis to justify me forking over a good bit of money. If a game has a big world but not a whole lot to do (such as GTAIV), then I tend to lose interest in it pretty quickly. If a game is interesting but only a handful of hours long, then it's not worth full price. I want games that if I pop them in a year or two from now, I'll still have a good time while remembering how much fun I had with them in the past. Anything that feels like work or has bad elements that constantly stick out never gets purchased.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
Multiplayer experiences for me are in the challenge. A game will not be fun if the playing field is uneven, either because of cheating or just a dramatic difference in skill (I should NEVER play RTS games against anyone else, for example). I don't have fun getting my ass kicked 100% of the time. Depending on the genre, winning 100% of the time also wouldn't be any fun, and being closer to a 50/50 mark would be ideal. Win some, lose some, always learning or having to adapt. If there's more than one way to win or inventive ways to, I'll be all over it. But when zerg rush is the only way, feh.
In regard to the 100% winning comment, the aspect that WOULD make it fun (or otherwise rewarding) is some sort of start tracking or glory hogging.
This is the pretty much the way I feel too: if a game's multiplayer or single player aspect is fun enough, I'm willing to get the game just for that aspect alone.
I bought Call of Duty 2 based soley on the one level in the single player demo, since I hadn't played any games which offered that type of a cinematic experience without making me feel like I was watching a cutscene. I didn't get into the multiplayer at all, so it was pretty much all about the SP experience. It's the same with Mass Effect (well, that was a gift, but still :P): I knew going in that there wouldn't be multiplayer at all, but that I could expect good gameplay and storytelling.
The one advantage to only expecting to play one mode when buying the game is that if the other turns out to be good, it's like an extra bonus
I'm basically willing to forgive a game which has both single and multiplayer, but either is shoddy, just as long as one of the two is loads of fun (if they're both shoddy but still fun, I'd still forgive it: I bought Driv3r and Driver: Parallel Lines, after all). I bought Left 4 Dead to play with my friends IRL, and originally didn't intend to even touch single player ("Oh, it's just the same thing but with bots. Myeh.")
(Although I've been giving it a shot in single player mode for the past few days, though, and while it's not as good as playing with human teammates, it's still quite fun. So...)
Not to diverge too much, but it's just like playing games which are predominantly multiplayer-only with bots, and no humans (ala this comic). If I get more fun out of playing something like CS: Source against the included bots than playing against humans, I'd do that.
Just to jump on that real quick, an example of a game I knew I should've disliked but couldn't fucking help it:
State of Emergency
When I thought about it, I was unimpressed with the game. But when the controller was in my hand I couldn't help but lose a couple hours to it.
I would probably shit my pants if I put $60 down on a game and finished it in one afternoon. There's no level editor or unlockable secrets or anything like that?