Why is multiplayer still being forced?

[BanicRhys]

My belief is that a multiplayer mode stops a lot of people from immediately trading the game in at Gamestop etc once they complete the campaign.

As someone who has absofuckinglutely no interest in multiplayer of any kind, this is why I'm happy to see used games die, because publishers might stop pressuring their devs to include a tacked on multiplayer mode at the expense of the single player just a little bit.

And a multi-player mode being developed doesn't necessarily take away from the quality of the single-player game.

Except when the single player mode feels like the devs ran out of time/money, eg. Mass Effect 3.

 

[HigherTomorrow]

Yeah! After all, it's not like multiplayer games sell! Or multiplayer in games rarely actually subtracts from the experience! Or people simply like playing with friends! Or if you wanted to ignore multiplayer, you could!

Oh wait

 

[Snotnarok]

Well let's run down the benefits list:
- online pass
- excuse for more DRM
- excuse for forced service-shops (Steam, Origin, Uplay)
- excuse for always-online
- a player that keeps grinding the multi will buy all your DLC
- excuse to remove mods or even ban people for them, so they have no other options for content
- and ultimately excuse to govern the games lifespan, a game heavily dependent on servers can be killed with their removal at the opportune moment

Of course none of those are benefits for consumers, but who the hell cares about you...

I was about to say you covered it all, but you missed out one more thing

-So you try to get your friends to play multiplayer with you/they get the game too.

 

[Zealous]

It attracts a wider audience that will continue to play the game for longer and thus generates additional revenue in both the short term and long term. Sure, some of the people may go back to the more mainstream titles after a while, but that still an extra buck. Also online passes and tons of overpriced lacklustre DLC offer even more money and the DLC can extend the life of the game beyond what it would have normally been.

I do agree with you though, the world would be a better place without hamfisted multiplayer sapping a great singleplayer game.

 

[Auron]

Max Payne 3 came out great and functional Max Payne 1 and 2 had none far as I remember, I see no problem at all with it.

 

[Jennacide]

...because a lot of people ASK/BEG for multiplayer. The companies are only responding to that.

Really? never saw annoying begging god multiplayer In the new tomb raided or mass effect, no one complained dishonoured or druz ex didn't have multiplayer

Then you weren't paying attention, because LOADS of people were asking for multiplayer in Mass Effect, although in the form of a quasi MMO, and not the horde mode we got. (Which I'll admit, isn't awful, but still nothing I wanted) And yes, there are people that did complain that Dishonored and Deus Ex lacked a multiplayer mode.

The issue is that these same people asking for multiplayer modes are hoping they'd be modes that still encapsulate the game they are playing. It has happened, look at Spy vs Merc in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory/Pandora Tommorow. Nobody thought multiplayer in Splinter Cell was a good idea at first, and it was OUTSTANDING. The hope is always for a multiplayer mode that does the game justice, but these days it's usually just a shitty third person shooter, horde mode, or tower defense; sometimes mix and match. (Amusingly, Dungeon Defenders is all three, and somehow turned out good)

 

[Vault101]

Then you weren't paying attention, because LOADS of people were asking for multiplayer in Mass Effect, although in the form of a quasi MMO, and not the horde mode we got.

mass effect and MMO in the same sentence?
[img/]http://media.tumblr.com/50681a805561cd8fd0e0391a9de24467/tumblr_inline_mi2as0f3ua1qz4rgp.gif[/img]

[quote/] And yes, there are people that did complain that Dishonored and Deus Ex lacked a multiplayer mode.[/quote]
again, not in the online spaces I was freaquenting...but then unless we are dealing with more solid evidence this is kind of pointless

eather way just because they want it doesnt mean the developer should or s obligated do it (especially at the cost of single player)

the thing is, multiplyer isnt bad..the reason many people like myself are (addmitidly) so volitile towards it is this "idea" that is a nessecity..that it has to be be there its furstratign because the industry as a whole does not seem to get it in their thick heads that single player and multiplayer are compeltly and utterly different, and NOT interchangable (but then I dont belive they dont know that....like people have said mutliplayer has its benefits for the money people)

now weather or not multiplayer negativly affects single player is somthing near impossible to measure, but I like to work on the logic that if a game is purley single player then THAT it where my $60 goes, if the game is bad or short then the multiplayer cant be an excuse

 

[bug_of_war]

And a multi-player mode being developed doesn't necessarily take away from the quality of the single-player game.

Except when the single player mode feels like the devs ran out of time/money, eg. Mass Effect 3.

Except Mass Effect 3 ran out of neither time or money...seriously, it got it's released date extended by an extra couple of months so that they could polish up the single player and add in the multiplayer. Lets not turn this into an ME3 debate, but if you're gonna use something as an example use something tht fits better than ME3.

OT:

Multiplayer isn't bad, I don't get why people who don't play multiplayer have a gripe with it. You don't play it, so how does it effect you? You say it takes away from the single player game yet there seems to be no examples that suppourt this theory. You say the tacked on multiplayer is bad, then don't play it and enjoy the single player. Who cares if the game in question doesn't seem to need multiplayer, Assassins Creed doesn't need multiplayer, but it turned out to be good and added to the story. Mass Effect 3's multiplayer also connects to the single player, and while it isn't spectacular, it's not bad.

Multiplayer is just a bonus feature, and it gives longevity to games that have short single players, and I personally would prefer shelling out 90 dollars for a 10 hour game with multiplayer then just a 10 hour single player, regardless of how good the single player may be.

 

[infohippie]

Multiplayer is just a bonus feature, and it gives longevity to games that have short single players, and I personally would prefer shelling out 90 dollars for a 10 hour game with multiplayer then just a 10 hour single player, regardless of how good the single player may be.

This is exactly why I don't like seeing multiplayer added to games so often, it becomes a cheap way to pad out the length. I buy a game solely for the single player experience, and if I am paying full price for it I expect a good twenty or thirty hours of single player story at the least. I don't rush through games like many people do, I take my time and enjoy the story, so I got around twenty hours out of Dishonored, but if a game feels short or incomplete yet has a tacked-on multiplayer you can bet I'm going to get pissy about the wasted time the devs could have used to add to the single-player story.

 

[Elijin]

No one's forcing the multiplayer. If you dont wish to engage in it, you dont have to. Its just there for those who do.

Putting the MP there is the start, you cant have your next sensational hit unless you try. Saying not to bother because your MP wont be the next big thing is just ridiculous.

Oh and the development thing. MP development doesnt draw from SP development. Its pretty much always a dedicated MP team, which means the SP dev team isnt having their workload spread, and SP missing out, as you say.

But yeah in the end, variety isnt a bad thing. You dont have to engage in it, but others can be super pleased at MP in their favourite titles.

 

[Vault101]

Multiplayer is just a bonus feature, and it gives longevity to games that have short single players, and I personally would prefer shelling out 90 dollars for a 10 hour game with multiplayer then just a 10 hour single player, regardless of how good the single player may be.

thats the thing....its easyer to have a short single player and tack on a multiplayer than it is to add more tot he single player

 

[Canadamus Prime]

there are a few reasons from what i have seen.

the first is that publishers have always jumped on the latest fad bandwagon. when 3D games became the latest thing every game had to have it even if they would do better and look better with 2D.

I think that has more to do with it than anything else. Publishers tend to jump on bandwagons and latch onto whatever they think will sell games regardless of how little practical sense it makes.

 

[Therumancer]

With Tomb Raider coming out later this week it got me wonder why is there a multiplayer aspect in what is and has only been renowned for being a deeply engaging single player experience. Here I thought that we were over the need to cram it into games for "addition sales" because CoD has one; when it was proven that it just doesn't work, prime examples being Dead Space 2 and Bioshock 2, both of which have removed the multiplayer aspect in their new iterations. And I don't even want to get into Spec Ops the line...

It does work in some cases like Assassins Creed or Max Payne but that's because they both have interesting and unique mechanics and Creed even works it into the universe which is neat. What I'm saying is why cram in a totally vanilla sometimes awful multiplayer into games that would do fine on their own just because apparently its needed because that's what people look at when they buy games. Wrong! Especially for games like Tomb Raider which are solely marketed on the single player and the only time some people will even see that it has multiplayer is when they look at the back of the box because they were intrigued by the single player already.

Also if the multiplayer offers nothing new or interesting people will just go back to playing the Call of Duties and the Halo's and then you the gaming company have wasted money and time putting something worthless that no ones going to play when you could have made the single player better or even longer.

So why multiplayer, why!!?

To be honest I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that Multiplayer has been developed so heavily that it's relatively easy to churn out (though not nessicarily GOOD multiplayer). Multiplayer gives an excuse to sell minimal content, like a single map, for a premium price after the fact as an add on. What's more developing single player content and putting a single player in the center of the action as a hero, and having the developers build an entire world (characters, events, maps, quests, objectives) around them takes a lot of work and involves developing a lot of assets that might not even be used. With multi-player you can create the basic bones of something and then leave it entirely to the players to do their own thing and create the content themselves effectively. With single player you might have to create literally dozens of maps, models, voice sets, etc... for a single sale amounting to a few hours of content, where with multiplayer again, once the basics are in place, you might just need one map and you can get a payday, and sell differant models, features, voice sets, etc... seperatly.

Given the money to be made on it, and increasing ease of development, I think it's why we're seeing an increasing trend towards the development of games where it's the single player that's the tacked on aspect, and in games that are still at their core a single player experience there is a tendency to want to toss in a multiplayer mode for the potential sales if nothing else.

To be honest for a long time tacked on multiplayer modes were generally terrible, but as companies have gotten better at them, we've started to see some fairly decent ones, "Mass Effect 3" having a surprisingly solid Multiplayer attached to it for example appear, and the success has doubtlessly done nothing but inspire companies to continue doing more of the same.

 

[Jingle Fett]

My thoughts? In addition to stuff like online passes, I think it's mainly because...games are "supposed to have them". You want to make a game, here's a standard list of features you need to include. Internet is popular so we have to include some sort of feature that implements it. Socialness is popular so if we can include that, more people will like it. And multiplayer just so happens to have all of those! Plus Call of Duty and Halo are super popular because they have multiplayer. So if we include all those features, the game will be super popular! I'm super duper serial.

I think it's less for nefarious reasons, and more that a lot of people consider those features to be standard features all games should have (although I totally get seeing it as nefarious). It's misguided sure (the standard I mean), but there you have it.

Ironically, all that bullshit about games becoming more and more expensive? I'd be willing to bet that a huge part of the reason they're becoming more and more expensive is because of forced online interaction.

You want to add online features to an otherwise offline game, that can be a boatload of work. Let alone having stuff like a proper lobby/matchmaking service, designing good maps, balancing the game regularly, fixing bugs, lots of playtesting, and on top of all that, somehow making it fun and unique. Then you probably also have to hire additional staff, networking programmers and whatnot. If the game wasn't designed with a good multiplayer experience in mind and instead its simply being included to meet the requirements or because it's the standard, then of course it's going to be crappy.
I imagine that's part of the reason so many games just default to Call of Duty competitive type multiplayer--it's the most popular multiplayer and the developers don't care for it or didn't give it much thought, so they figure they may as well just do that. The problem with including Call of Duty/Halo type multiplayer in a game that doesn't need it is that CoD multiplayer is tailored for a specific type of audience and experience(extreme competition), which might not necessarily mesh well with the audience of the actual game itself, along with the fact that in CoD and Halo, multiplayer was designed to be an ongoing thing and one of the core features. So when a game includes that type of multiplayer and the developers aren't prepared for it being an ongoing thing, it dies off after a really short time. Of course if the multiplayer doesn't mesh well with the game because it's a different style of game they could always...tweak...the design to make it work better for that type of multiplayer *cough* Dead Space 3

Essentially it's an on-going money sink that the budget has to take into account, therefore the budget goes up. But they have to include it because it's "standard". Some developer, I don't remember which, said something about the multiplayer in his game being a cancerous growth and that they had to include it for the only reason that the publisher said so.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Let's make a short list!

Publisher required it (and will cut funding if you don't do what they want)
It looked better in planning then it turned out (Hey sometimes things just wind up not working out so good when actually finished and scrapping it all together would suck more then including a bad multiplayer)
The developer thinks it's good (People have opinions afterall and internal opinion may not reflect public opinion)
It is fun and you just don't like it (sometimes people declare something bad when actually they just don't like it)
God help them all, they actually listened to the fans indiscriminately, one of the worse things you could possible do most of the time since fans suggest the stupidest ideas. Sometimes they come up with a good one, 99% of the time its face-palm worthy.

 

[bug_of_war]

This is exactly why I don't like seeing multiplayer added to games so often, it becomes a cheap way to pad out the length. I buy a game solely for the single player experience, and if I am paying full price for it I expect a good twenty or thirty hours of single player story at the least. I don't rush through games like many people do, I take my time and enjoy the story, so I got around twenty hours out of Dishonored, but if a game feels short or incomplete yet has a tacked-on multiplayer you can bet I'm going to get pissy about the wasted time the devs could have used to add to the single-player story.

I am unable to think of any games (other than The Darkness II) that fit that description. I understand there are games that are short and have multiplayer, but I don't see the problem with that. I also play games entirely for single player, but I have yet to feel cheated out of my money. I understand that other people react differently, we're all different and I'm not trying to say you're wrong or anything like that, but my advice to you is just to be more careful with your purchase. I remember when Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood came out I was unsure of whether to play it because I thought it was just there for multiplayer. It wasn't until I actually rented the game that I found myself enjoying it and decided that it was worth the 60 dollar price tag.

 

[Keymik]

Multiplayer is just a bonus feature, and it gives longevity to games that have short single players, and I personally would prefer shelling out 90 dollars for a 10 hour game with multiplayer then just a 10 hour single player, regardless of how good the single player may be.

This is exactly why I don't like seeing multiplayer added to games so often, it becomes a cheap way to pad out the length. I buy a game solely for the single player experience, and if I am paying full price for it I expect a good twenty or thirty hours of single player story at the least. I don't rush through games like many people do, I take my time and enjoy the story, so I got around twenty hours out of Dishonored, but if a game feels short or incomplete yet has a tacked-on multiplayer you can bet I'm going to get pissy about the wasted time the devs could have used to add to the single-player story.

While I agree with what you're saying I just wanted to point out that Assassin's Creed had a different section do the multiplayer while one part solely focused on the single player for this reason ^^
Some other studios does this aswell but I can't remember which ones at the moment

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Microtransactions, so you can buy tops for Lara or an ugly shirt for some guy that hangs out with Lara.

You are joking, right?

Dead Space is a franchise with unique enough shooting and movement mechanics that they could have made a genuinely interesting new multi-player game out of it. The fact that they didn't is irrelevant.

a) Unique? It couldn't be more generic, bland and boring if they sent you a UE3 tech demo. It might have been in the first game, where you actually had to aim for limbs, but 3 was the same as every other shooter, and not as good or interesting as them either.
b) DS2 had online passes and vs. multiplayer.

 

[sanquin]

If that 10 hours is solid then I'd prefer the 10 hours,

if inlay mass effect 3 or dead space 2 multiplayer I don't feel like I'm actually playing those games, I'm playing less interesting version filled with other people, just going through the motions, if anything such games can actually kill replay ability because depending on the games staying power there's only so long that I can get the most out of the game before the servers dry up and everyone's moved onto the next game

They won't ever say '10 hours of solid gameplay' in marketing though. So to the majority, the 30 hours sounds more appealing. And yes I agree, because of this some games implement really terrible multiplayer. Like Mass Effect. It was entertaining for about 2 hours for me, then it got boring and repetitive.

 

[sanquin]

I'd rather play a single player that's 10 hours and has great replayability over one that has a shitty multiplayer component that I will use for 5 months.Besides single player games aren't that except for shooters and I wish developers/publishers will realize that some people like to play their games alone.

I'm talking about marketing here. They would never put in '10 hours of great replayability' in their trailers and such. They're marketing to the majority. And the majority will prefer the sound of '30 or more hours of gameplay' over '10 hours of gameplay.' They don't care about you as an individual. They care about the general market.