To be a little more fair to the game companies that think "single player games are lonely", I believe there IS something to be said for an enhancement of what Valve called the Single Player Plus experience. It's the "idea" that rarely do you truly play a game alone, even those of us who prefer single player games talk to our friends about said games, interact with an online community discussing said games, watch reviews and videos about said games etc. and there really is a LOT that could be done with this kind of experience.
Take Skyrim as an example, I don't want Skyrim to be a required multiplayer experience, I LOVE wandering the world on my own, discovering secrets, having huge freedom to effect the world the way I want and not have to deal with some random tool ruining my experience but at the same time it'd be awesome to say... be able to mark cool locations in the world and send them to my friends, or even have a "social area" where we can show off our characters to eachother in real time. Or even something like Dragon Quest 9's "Inn" where you could have your friends characters hang out.
At the same time this kind of thing is frequently used for "forced co-op" and can hamper the Single Player Experience. Case and point also being Dragon Quest 9, a game that squandered a legacy of fantastic characters and great storytelling for a Co-op Experience that was ultimately pretty damn lame. I mean I don't MIND being able to co-op the game with my friends, but if I had to choose between Co-op and a well written story with good characters I would take the well written story in a heartbeat. I guess most game devs are still too damn cheap to make games where you can have both co-op and a good singleplayer.
Take Skyrim as an example, I don't want Skyrim to be a required multiplayer experience, I LOVE wandering the world on my own, discovering secrets, having huge freedom to effect the world the way I want and not have to deal with some random tool ruining my experience but at the same time it'd be awesome to say... be able to mark cool locations in the world and send them to my friends, or even have a "social area" where we can show off our characters to eachother in real time. Or even something like Dragon Quest 9's "Inn" where you could have your friends characters hang out.
At the same time this kind of thing is frequently used for "forced co-op" and can hamper the Single Player Experience. Case and point also being Dragon Quest 9, a game that squandered a legacy of fantastic characters and great storytelling for a Co-op Experience that was ultimately pretty damn lame. I mean I don't MIND being able to co-op the game with my friends, but if I had to choose between Co-op and a well written story with good characters I would take the well written story in a heartbeat. I guess most game devs are still too damn cheap to make games where you can have both co-op and a good singleplayer.