Single Player Dying?

[Zeromaeus]

I too dislike the multiplayer in most games. Its not that it isn't well done, its just that I can't really compare to the skill level most of the pro players have. Except in Street Fighter. Even then it doesn'ty have the appeal to the true one-one-one two controllers, one screen awesomeness of a two-player experience.

Some games are getting too short. FPS's need to be a bit longer. Others seem to be floating in a limbo state of 10-14 hours, which is okay I guess. RPG's stay the 40+ hour games they've always been. I jsut think there's too much focus on online multiplayer nowadays.

Quality i sthe real focus, however, and I think that too has taken a dip. I'm sorry, but I've played a bunch of CoD games. They're all the same game. Almost literally. They don't have good single player campaigns (I could play a higher difficulty, but why would I want to if I didn't enjoy the normal difficulty?), and the multiplayer is, well, uninteresting for me. Halo 3 is okay, but it takes about six hours to beat the same gray and brown game I beat before. Yeah, I drudged through Legendary, but I honestly didn't enjoy it.

Honestly, due to both interest and financial distress, I've seen myself playing older RPG's more than anything else. Dark Cloud 2, a pretty good JRPG, had me playing it, the fourth time through (this time), for about 50 hours before I tired of its ways. I'll even turn back to it in a couple of days and beat it when I yurn for its ending. I'm on FF XII now.

I'm rambling a bit. Sorry. Single player HAS taken a hit due to the online multiplayer phenomenon. Is it dead/dying? Not really. Are older games better? Sometimes.

Note:
I have not played Batman. I am poor. My friends are poor. My sister has a debt to Movies Starz and, since our accounts were connected, so do I. I usually don't get to play new games until they're considered old games. Heck, I haven't played TF2 yet, so I don't know if its a good multiplayer game. I also haven't played Dragon Age yet. I was fortunate to have a friend with Fallout 3 to know it was as good as Oblivion, only refined to a perfect shine.
Bah!
I do have it good though. I've got enough PS2 games and DS games to last me 'till doomsday.

 

[tkioz]

Fine Dining you get less bang per buck, but it's so delicious it overcomes the obstacle of lack of satisfaction. The better the food tastes the more full your gonna feel afterwords. If a game truly immerses you through the same means most movies do it's lack of content can be forgiven.

Not for a $100. Seriously if I'm dropping that kind of coin, I expect it to last longer then an average bout of Mexican food intergeneration.

 

[Thaius]

I play games for the story as well, so I am also annoyed at some short length. At the same time though, I know that some genres are generally longer than others. Shooters tend to be about 8-10 hours, but if the experience is great I would just as easily get it as I would a 40-hour RPG.

 

[Zeromaeus]

Fine Dining you get less bang per buck, but it's so delicious it overcomes the obstacle of lack of satisfaction. The better the food tastes the more full your gonna feel afterwords. If a game truly immerses you through the same means most movies do it's lack of content can be forgiven.

Not for a $100. Seriously if I'm dropping that kind of coin, I expect it to last longer then an average bout of Mexican food intergeneration.

This. Why pay the same amount for an all-you-can-eat buffet that you would pay for lobster for two?

 

[L3m0n_L1m3]

I liked the LittleBig Planet singleplayer, as well as Prototype and InFamous.

 

[ethaninja]

Sweet I thought I was the only SP person =D I heard that the PC version of CoD 4.5 (hows that for some aye?), had amazing single player, but I can't say the same for the console version, because from what I heard that that version was focused on MP.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Some kinds of game have gotten shorter, but others have actually gotten longer. Just look at Dragon Age: Origins. That game can easily take 60+ hours to complete.

Besides, FPS games are generally one trick ponies so to speak and when the become long enough it actually becomes tedious. Half-Life for example was a 30 - 40 hour game thanks largely to annoying gameplay extension techniques. The entire latter third of the game was nothing more than a series of increasingly frustrating jumping puzzles.

In the case of MW2, you have to realize that the single player game explains almost none of the success. MW1 and 2 have made their sales largely because of the multiplayer component. For most, the addition of single player is simply icing on the cake.

 

[Slayer_2]

I agree. Personally, I would easily trade away the MW2 multiplayer "experience" for a 10-12 hour long campaign. I like the co-op idea, but the only people I ever met online in MW2 were either: noobs, whiny kids, over-competitive idiots or mud-slingers. The fact is, multiplayer takes WAY less time to design but far more time to play-test and balance (which can be done by anyone). So less of the dev's time wasted and the end products satisfies your average 13-year-old Xbox player for 100+ hours. Win/win for the developers.

 

[slipknot4]

Killzone2 sucks
MW1 is an absolute peice of crap. BF2 is the best Realistic Standard state Multiplayer FPS, because it was made right, unlike every game you have praised
UT3 is an absolute piece of garbage. /Pulls out a chainsaw, and proceeds to kill Captain mcasshole with it for actually thinking the worst game in the entire series is good. UT2xx is the best in the series, 3 ruined everything, it isnt fun. and before you say anything, i have played all 5 versions of Unreal Tournament

Can you justify that statement or are you just implying that Killzone 2 is shit to prove me wrong?

 

[teisjm]

Most RPG's offer lots and lots of SP gameplay hours.

Maybe trophys and achievments are to blame... if a developer adds a challenge to already existing gameplay, such as beat this leevl in less than x seconds. they think it's making teh actual game longer.

Replaying the game or parts of it, while it can certainly be enjoyable, doesn't prolong the actual game.
neither does difficoulty settings.
If 2 people make 2 identical games except that one has "easy, meduim and hard" and teh other have "noobtard, newbie, beginner, easy, medium, hard, very hard, pro and the chosen one" or whetever doesn't make the second game 3 times longer than the first game.

having optional areas, sidequests and stuff does. Even though you can run through the game without completing them.

While the things may seem similar they're not. and i think some developers may have chosen to swap the optional side-stuff for just replaying what you've already played with a timer / harder / ammo/kill limit etc.

 

[Soxafloppin]

It may take 6 ours to compete the story mode, but if you try to get 100% on everything. You will find that its much longer.

 

[tkioz]

It may take 6 ours to compete the story mode, but if you try to get 100% on everything. You will find that its much longer.

That's replay not game length, replay isn't value for money, replay is when a game is so good you want to play it again, that's very rare, at least for me.

 

[XJ-0461]

A lot of the games I own I play for the single player mode. Some examples:

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Assassin's Creed
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction
Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty
Etc.

The only games I really play for multiplayer are COD4 and COD: WAW, and even then I really enjoyed the single player modes.

 

[Spinozaad]

There should be a nuance to this discussion.

It's kind of unfair to compare, for example, the single player experience of a first person shooter with a (semi-)open world game.

Let's take Morrowind and pit it against any Call of Duty game.
I've played the first few CoD games, and I played Modern Warfare. I'm not a fanboy, nor an expert. I spend a couple of hours on these prime examples of lineair-but-fun games. So, a couple of hours to finish the game.

Now, if we say that killing the bad guy of the main storyline is an adequate criteria for 'winning the game', Morrowind can be finished in less than eight minutes [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1IRxTN-_kU]. Does this make Morrowind a shorter game? No, because you can go everywhere you want, the structure of the game does not force you to progress.
FPS's, for game's sake, do exactly this.

As I final thought I'd like to say that six hours for a game is, in my eyes, too short. But asking for more than 15-20 hours (replay value included if the game is really good) in a FPS is kind of pushing it. 15-20 hours for a RPG is simply downright retarded.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

Well, think of it this way: even when playing single-player, how often are you genuinely alone? MW2's single player almost always has you with squadmates. L4D2 has you with other survivors. It's rare to find games like Doom that keep you completely alone, simply because to be totally cut off from any friendly individuals in a sea of hostiles is a terrifying thing.

So, in so many words, blah blah blah, humans are social creatures, crave interaction even if virtual, but especially if it's with real humans over an electronic medium.

 

[Emilin_Rose]

I think we need to make one big stickied thread that lists single player games that are decently long. Personally, i've had people recommend games to me, and all of them are ones that fall into at least one of 3 categories. Either horror/fps, incredibly short but "great multiplayer" or too old to find at the fred meyer down the road. I have nothing against older games but when the nearest library is in narnia, an hour and a half down one direction of the dirt road, and the nearest grocery store other than the aforementioned fred meyer two and a half hours in the other direction, it makes it kind of hard to get a hold of older games like fable. and i can't get a bank account because the nearest bank is right next door to the aforementioned library and requires making the account in person.

 

[tkioz]

So, in so many words, blah blah blah, humans are social creatures, crave interaction even if virtual, but especially if it's with real humans over an electronic medium.

Are you new to the internet? I'd run screaming from 99% of the people on here if I met them IRL.

Seriously most people online just annoy the hell out of me in games, never shut up, hurl abuse at each other, and generally act like dicks, that's why if I multi-player, which is rare, it's only with people I actually know, and if need be punch them if they act like that.

 

[Rock 'n' Soul]

I really hope that that's not true. If developers start slacking because they think the multiplayer features sell the title, then they're going to lose a lot of fans they didn't know they had.

There are some games out there, where it only makes sense to play with your friends, and in RE5 for example, you can't fucking play that game without a pal to watch your back. But, I still have a lot of fun playing single player. I'm personally a fan of multiplayer games, but I think the market for single player stuff isn't ever going to die.

It just might be turning into a niche market at this point, and spending loads of time and money on a really bad ass single player game might not pull in as much as the next top of the line FPS.

 

[Rock 'n' Soul]

So, in so many words, blah blah blah, humans are social creatures, crave interaction even if virtual, but especially if it's with real humans over an electronic medium.

Are you new to the internet? I'd run screaming from 99% of the people on here if I met them IRL.

Seriously most people online just annoy the hell out of me in games, never shut up, hurl abuse at each other, and generally act like dicks, that's why if I multi-player, which is rare, it's only with people I actually know, and if need be punch them if they act like that.

Fuck yes. It's those people that drive me to single player in the first place. There needs to be a "this tall to ride" feature for online multiplayer.

 

[FallenRainbows]

FPS games are multiplayer, if you buy one for the single player experience you're stupid

wrong. FPS games have to be made specifically and only for Multiplayer to be good in multiplayer. MW2 sucks for this reason. this is why the single best FPS made so far is Battlefield 2, as bad company also fucked up it's priorities.

Bad company was a game you played for the story. A game without a campaign mode is nothing but a disc with a physics engine and a graphics renderer.
Battlefield 2 was a shallow game without any appeal. BFBC on the other had must have been one of the best FPS's ever made alongside Modern warfare 2.
But playing a FPS for the story only is stupid.

I'd just like to add fuel to this little fire by saying that I love Battlefield 2 like my own little runty hypothetical child. It's as close as I've ever come to finding a MMOFPRTS (you work it out). Clearly it's got no more plot than UT / TF / etc. bu that's okay.

But I also just finished playing Bad Company and I love that too. It works well in Singleplayer - the characters are fun, the script is cool, the story is amusing and I couldn't be happier that Dice have made a console game and kept it on consoles. Bethesda and 2K being guilty of dumping console games on to PCs without thinking.


To be honest though we (as consumers we are part of the games industry) are crashing towards a simple 3 tier arrangement:
1) Open-World Offline Games (GTA, TES, etc.)
2) Multiplayer "Contest" Games (UT, CoD, BF, TF, etc.)
3) MMOGs.

For your MMOFPSRPG try fallen earth; free trail key from the escapist.