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Is Single Player Mode Dying in Modern Video Games?


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On 6/7/2021 at 1:33 AM, FauxFurry said:

These trends will likely come and go in cycles until someone figures out that it might work better to just have games dedicated to multiplayer or single player just like any other gaming medium does. Pinball will never be Foosball nor does it ever need to be. 

I think I would be okay with that. There are some decent games that somehow lack a pause button and I think the multiplayer functionality might be the cause. I get that pausing would get annoying in online multiplayer but to leave it out of single player mode is just inconvenient. You know for people with lives and such.

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On 6/10/2021 at 4:06 AM, Doctor Cadaver said:

Thanks to the plethora of cheaters, haters and trolls in multiplayer, single player games are here to stay... thankfully.

Was looking for an online co-op I could play with a friend and was surprised there didn't seem to be that many good options. There were some, just not nearly as much as we expected to find. She said mmo was definitely out for the reasons you just stated and I agree. I mean sometimes you do want to play with other people online and not deal with the grief.

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No it's not dying.

Silly people like the ones who run EA claimed it was then had to backtrack and allowed Jedi Fallen Order to be released because the fans weren't buying inot  their lame Single player games are dying lies.

Yes there is no SP campaign in the new Battlefield game and the way to prevent that is for players to boycott the game but I doubt that will happen.

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1 hour ago, ANGRYWOLVERINE said:

No it's not dying.

Silly people like the ones who run EA claimed it was then had to backtrack and allowed Jedi Fallen Order to be released because the fans weren't buying inot  their lame Single player games are dying lies.

Yes there is no SP campaign in the new Battlefield game and the way to prevent that is for players to boycott the game but I doubt that will happen.

That is perfectly fine as long as there will be Battlefield games or other First person Shooters out there with no multi-player modes. Keeping the two separate can keep the experience from being watered down by trying to cater to two usually very different types of audiences. 

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Games in general are dead to me. Nothing lives up to my expectations because I've pretty much have grown past games with a fixed story line that tend to be poorly alone. I have greatly lost my interest in what passes for an RPG these days. And if I can't heavily mod it, I'm not bothering. So SPG or MPG, they're both pretty much dead to me.

 

I had hoped CP2077 would be very similar to the table top, but it's just mainstream garbage.

Edited by Guest
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I enjoyed multiplayer the most when the matches were considerably longer than what we have now. Like an MMO, one could drop into the game - play for a few hours and the game didn't end every 10-15 minutes.

 

Some of the matches in Novalogic's Joint Operations could last several hours with no winner.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Rising    150 players at one time with HUGE maps meant one could join a game and maybe push forward a little or get pushed back over the course of a single hour.

 

Over time I've noticed games have kept getting 'smaller'. Smaller maps, less people, shorter matches - just like the attention spans of so many people. Sure, I can appreciate that some people want or 'need' games to have shorter matches but they definitely feel more like an Arena event than an epic world event.

 

Once they put such a focus on leader boards and rankings, the cheaters started breeding like rabbits. So at least I got to experience Multiplayer when it was amazing before it became the questionable experience it is today.

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9 hours ago, ANGRYWOLVERINE said:

No it's not dying.

Silly people like the ones who run EA claimed it was then had to backtrack and allowed Jedi Fallen Order to be released because the fans weren't buying inot  their lame Single player games are dying lies.

Yes there is no SP campaign in the new Battlefield game and the way to prevent that is for players to boycott the game but I doubt that will happen.


Too bad that Fallen Order was just a flash in the pan with no staying power.
New Game+ was patched in after the excitement was already gone, and people had already uninstalled it. It was nothing more than a prettier-to-look-at knockoff of Jedi Outcast, but with worse mechanics, and the Disney Lightsaber problem of it not being able to cut through humanoid targets, leaving it as little more than a shiny bonk-stick like the police batons in Futurama.

Sticking with EA and Star Wars, look at Battlefront EA 2. They made a singleplayer campaign, and it was terrible. Everyone hated the BFEA2 campaign, mostly for its false advertising, but also because it gave Star Wars fans one of the single stupidest ideas anyone had ever heard up to that point; Operation: CINDER, which only got stupider as it was brought up in more and more media, like the third Disney Star Wars movie, and in The Mandalorian. Not only that, but it singlehandedly broke the franchise own canon by making events within the movies impossible through contradictions.

Then we go over to Battlefield which hasn't had a decent campaign since BF4- and even that was mostly just reduced to memes- including the fact that BFV didn't even have all of its campaign chapters available for like three months after launch. You couldn't play the last one until it was released after a few content updates for multiplayer, and so people complained. All those complaints boiled down to 'customer upset with singleplayer mode'.

Now we've got the reveal trailer for Battlefield 2042, and there is confirmed to be NO SINGLEPLAYER CAMPAIGN, and the video has been met with overwhelmingly positive feedback. Nevermind all the people saying that a campaign would make it better. All EA will take away from this is that there are no complaints about singleplayer because there's no singleplayer, and everyone is giving the video of the multiplayer-only game thumbs up and likes everywhere.

Shift away from shooters to something like MIrror's Edge, and the first one from about 2008 was a moderate success with most people who did buy it, enjoying it, but those who weren't thrilled said that they just weren't interested in the gameplay. Then, there was the prequel / reboot, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, and it was just not good. Nobody seemed to like it, especially when most of the side missions were made nearly impossible, nullifying any help you'd get from watching tutorials captured from the demo as the timers were all reduced in the final release of the game. Any tutorial from the demo you could find on YouTube would have several seconds more on its timer that you'd get, so any that ends with less than 4 seconds to spare would be useless to follow as you would always run out of time if you followed them.

The message is clear to all of us consumers; we want better games with better singleplayer content.

The message is like mud to publishers; we want games as live services with more emphasis on multiplayer mode.

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3 hours ago, landess said:

I enjoyed multiplayer the most when the matches were considerably longer than what we have now. Like an MMO, one could drop into the game - play for a few hours and the game didn't end every 10-15 minutes.

 

Some of the matches in Novalogic's Joint Operations could last several hours with no winner.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Operations:_Typhoon_Rising    150 players at one time with HUGE maps meant one could join a game and maybe push forward a little or get pushed back over the course of a single hour.

 

Over time I've noticed games have kept getting 'smaller'. Smaller maps, less people, shorter matches - just like the attention spans of so many people. Sure, I can appreciate that some people want or 'need' games to have shorter matches but they definitely feel more like an Arena event than an epic world event.

 

Once they put such a focus on leader boards and rankings, the cheaters started breeding like rabbits. So at least I got to experience Multiplayer when it was amazing before it became the questionable experience it is today.

 

Back when i played MMO's the huge dungeons/instances/raids (whatever you want to call them) were fun the first time but there are only so many times you want to still be trying to clear one at 4am as its massive and if you left then potentially you'd never get a group again or one willing to enter into a part done dungeon to finish off which moves the content away from casual gamers to the more dedicated ones

 

The other problem was the level of elitistism you'd get with expectations that you'd cleared it X many times and were overly geared up for the challenge, when i stopped playing WoW you couldnt get into a group without linking an achievement for already having done the place and/or a high gear score, personally i never minded the new players as long as they said so at the start so you knew what to expect/compensate for but i did see loads of players flip out when we wiped due to the new tank/healer/dps not being a very good tank/healer/dps

 

Multiplayer can be good in some games but in others it can feel that it was just added as someone high up decided it had to have a multiplayer option (mass effect 3 as an example)

 

Single player when there is a story/reason for it can be good but other games i've played where the emphasis is on multiplayer they are basically an extended tutorial which often doesn't even get played

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54 minutes ago, pinky6225 said:

Single player when there is a story/reason for it can be good but other games i've played where the emphasis is on multiplayer they are basically an extended tutorial which often doesn't even get played

 

Yeah, this is why when I hear complaints about a single player campaign for things like Battlefield I just shake my head. That is NOT a single player game. It was designed from the ground up to be multiplayer - unlike the older Medal of Honor or Return to Castle Wolfenstein which had decent multiplayer added to an excellent single player game.

 

Lately I've been getting 'Zombiefied' as I've been playing State of Decay 2, Days Gone, and Dying Light. All good single player experiences in their own right.

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Several years ago EA claimed that singleplayer games are death (no doubt because they wanted to push for more live service schemes).

But their business model backfired to such an extend (see the whole lootbox debacle) it even caused some nations to change their laws. 

 

Lately it seems they've done a complete 180 on their stance on multiplayer games. They cancelled Anthem 2 and announced there would be no multiplayer component in Dragon Age 4. It seems they want to focus on Single Player again (at least for now).

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2 hours ago, Windu191 said:

Several years ago EA claimed that singleplayer games are death (no doubt because they wanted to push for more live service schemes).

But their business model backfired to such an extend (see the whole lootbox debacle) it even caused some nations to change their laws. 

 

Lately it seems they've done a complete 180 on their stance on multiplayer games. They cancelled Anthem 2 and announced there would be no multiplayer component in Dragon Age 4. It seems they want to focus on Single Player again (at least for now).


And then Battlefield 2042 gets announced, and they confirm that it's multiplayer only; no campaign, $70.

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24 minutes ago, ZeroFighter said:


And then Battlefield 2042 gets announced, and they confirm that it's multiplayer only; no campaign, $70.

 

Battlefield has always been primarily a multiplayer franchise, so no huge surprise there. The only good battlefield games with good campaigns (in my humble opinion) were the Bad Company games.

 

What their shift in focus means (I think) is that for now, SP franchises will only focus on SP and MP franchises will only focus on MP. 

For example franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect don't need an unneccessary multiplayer mode shoehorned in, just like Battlefield doesn't need a single player mode. 

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31 minutes ago, Windu191 said:

 

Battlefield has always been primarily a multiplayer franchise, so no huge surprise there. The only good battlefield games with good campaigns (in my humble opinion) were the Bad Company games.

 

What their shift in focus means (I think) is that for now, SP franchises will only focus on SP and MP franchises will only focus on MP. 

For example franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect don't need an unneccessary multiplayer mode shoehorned in, just like Battlefield doesn't need a single player mode. 


Ever since Bad Company, they've all had campaigns, save for Battlefield Play4Free which didn't cost a penny if you didn't want to spend one. Bad Company, Bad Company 2, BF3, BF4, Hardline, BF1, BFV... they all had campaigns. It also doesn't matter what individual people liked. I thought Bad Company 2's campaign was mediocre at best; I never finished it. BC1's campaign got me to complete it on a single rental, after which I never picked it up ever again. An enjoyable $6.34 for a 7-day experience, but not worth buying in my opinion. BF3 and 4 were good campaigns. Hardline, the less I say about it, the less of a chance of me getting banned for something, but suffice to say it was a BINO game if ever there was one; Battlefield In Name Only. BF1's mini campaigns were okay, but I'd have preferred a single long campaign; same with BFV's mini campaigns, though I will still gripe about The Last Tiger not being available for several months after launch.

Honestly, the only reason I ever got into Battlefield with Bad Company was BECAUSE they finally put a campaign into the franchise. The games prior to that, I didn't care for because they were multiplayer-only. I also didn't have online gaming until Bad Company, so that was probably a factor. Anyway, at this point, it just seems wrong to not have a campaign in a Battlefield game. It's an especially bad move since this is exactly what COD: Black Ops 4 did, and people were vocally upset. Why would EA want to copy something that upset customers in the past? Do they just hate money that badly?

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A problem with morern single player games are that producers are unwilling to release control to the customer now. They throw in online content and see modfing as a problem. Look at Dragon Age. The first game was designed with modding in mind the second one however where heavily restricted and the third game, Inquisition are virtually unmoddable.

 

I strongly suspect that the next Elderscrolls game will be mod restricted as well. Hold on to your Skyrim installations, they may be the last of their kind.

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Evil Actualized said the same thing about singe-player. Then they released a single-player game and it was their most successful release in years.

 

Forget triple-A studios if you want decent single-player games these days. Look for the indie studios and ones out of places like Japan and the rest of Asia. Let the companies who only care about the whales die. Especially the ones who used to be good but are now just as greedy and lazy as every other (*cough* Square Enix *cough*).

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I think as more software becomes available for amateur game designers to make 3d games, that will expand the single player market considerably. Right now a lot of talented people with little knowledge are making games with RPGmaker, and similar. Just think what they could do with the right tools to create something more akin to what the studios are doing.

 

OT but I will tell you one thing that is kicking the bucket slowly in all modern games is MSAA antialiasing. I use it to add SGSSAA to the games I play, which is the top tier AA if you have the hardware to handle it. Most games now use effects similar to ENB and MSAA won't work with games like that. I was saddened to find our Skyrim Special Edition replaced it with something like TAA, yuck.

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15 hours ago, Distortedrealms said:

I think as more software becomes available for amateur game designers to make 3d games, that will expand the single player market considerably. Right now a lot of talented people with little knowledge are making games with RPGmaker, and similar. Just think what they could do with the right tools to create something more akin to what the studios are doing.

That day may come sooner than you might think, It might have already arrived but we have yet to see the full benefit of it a the moment. 

https://forgottencitygame.com/

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16 hours ago, 27X said:

SMAA and MSAA are worthless at 4K and considering with top end CPU and GPU you can run Skyrim at 8K, it's literally redundant.

Unfortunately I am part of the small minority that has broken AA in all games unless I can use SGSSAA. If you don't deal with that problem you can never really understand, but I do, and not even using DSR at 4k gets rid of it. Tons of people bring up the problem on the Nvidia forums but are shot down by the meathead fanboys. So Sparse Grid is all that works for me.

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Guest AthenaESIV

Seems like single player is as strong as ever to me, between indie games and AAA titles coming (Elden Ring, FC6, and Starfield as just a few examples), there are a ton of games coming in 2021 and 2022 to look forward to.

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Well, Bethesda thought so. Thats why we have FO76. Man, i wished it could be used for modding. But without NPC's not much fun.

 

Generally 3th person shooters with multiplayer sell well (most of the time) but i do not like them much since there are so many kaputtniks out there that ruin your experience.

So, single story, just you and no one else games are rare. But i am not that informed anymore as i do not follow up on games.

The last one i bought was Prey which i actually loved. Such a good game.

 

Thinking of it. There are a lot of games for single player. Especially RPG's. Just not moddable i think.

 

Anyway, as long as there are game from Bethesda or other studios that allow modding, i am happy.

 

Multiplayer works for most i assume but i have to negative experience with it. I played a lot of CS back then and that got worst over time. Besides it bores me now and i am not good at it anymore.

 

I think single player will still be around. You just had 2077. I did not even buy that yet. Or OuterWorlds. So there are still good single player games. Well, i hope they are good. I haven't played them yet. To busy playing FO4 at the moment.

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