Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I want social interaction I play boardgames. I play video games for an escape from that.
You probably just don't follow gaming like you used to as a kid so assume it has gone to shit just because multiplayer games create the biggest waves. Or maybe you just don't really care for gaming like you used to.
Kinda like when people assume there's no good music during the hey day of dubstep. Or when people lament there's nothing to watch just because they only watch The Office and never branch out.
* XCOM: Enemy Within
* SOMA
* MGS V: The Phantom Pain
* Dark Souls 1 & 3
* Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
* DOOM (2016)
* Nier: Automata
* Hyper Light Drifter
* Hollow Knight
* The Talos Principle
* The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
* Wolfenstein: The New Order
* Furi
* Katana Zero
* Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Plus many more; I put significantly more hours into video games than many people (probably to the detriment of my career, lol) and I am barely scratching the surface of what's out there. Times are good for entertainment!
It’s very easy to say ‘music is just not the same as the music back in the day’, which is never true. Just catch up, stop with the developer only MacBooks and get an powerful gaming laptop (similar prices for some odd reason even though the specs are better) or console, and you’ll at least now have a chance to dip your toes back in.
They've never been more accessible and cheaper, either. Anyone else remember seeing SNES cartridge costs at launch?
The Dark/Demon Souls franchise is the undisputed king of forced online participation. MGS V has the same forced-online elements in the form of bases. You are literally penalized in both games for attempting to play entirely single-player.
I haven't played enough of the other examples to comment.
People famously play those games without an ethernet cable attached simply to play with some kind of similarity to a true single-player game -- I think that points to something being different between today's single-player games and yesterday's.
I played both Dark Souls 3 and MGS V to completion and never once engaged in multiplayer, except for that one time in DS3 where you have to get killed by a player if I recall?
The bases in MGS V were completely optional to the main story line. I put 100+ hours into the game without engaging once in those.
I think referring to either game as having "forced online participation" is a huge stretch.
- Stardew Valley
- The Witness
- Untitled Goose Game
Although I do think Jonathon Blow successfully dug into and found just about every single possible interesting puzzle you can make with moving from a dot and drawing a line through a maze to the end, including some really crazy things that most people wouldn't think of and wouldn't be possible if he didn't create a giant world for those puzzles to live in.
Has now multiplayer (CoOp based).
So not useful to meat new people but can be used as a platform to hang out with outer people you already know over the net.
sigh of one of the 5 people that liked II
All very different games, all very much single player focused (Doom is a very complete without ever going online). Tons more out there for every play style and taste. Steam will drown you in games if you wish.
Edit: notice that this list spans many years, with a single player game there is no need to rush and play it the day it drops. There is a huge backlog of games to tap into.
It was intersecting to watch their progress on their public Trello board as well. They used it pretty well.
I don't think they want that, exactly. What they want is to be able to sell a continuous stream of microtransactions, and the easiest way to do that is let people see each other and then sell them prettyshiny models and textures you can use while preening in front of other people. That necessitates an online component to allow the social context in which to preen.
I think the problem is they haven't come up with a way to sell a $5.00 expansion that amounts to about two-four person weeks of work on an extra model and some testing for single player games. (I've seen it done, and I'm sure it sells some, but not enough for them.) Single player added content takes, like, real work to get anything anyone will buy.
Making everything multiplayer on its own terms is an expensive and risky proposition. I don't think it's a terminal goal on its own; it has to be in the service of something.
The problem is there are very few if any good multiplayer options. Multiplayer gaming has become grind-fests where every game tries to encourage tens of thousands of hours of playtime to keep you engaged for decades. They don't rely on the fun of the natural game-play to keep you engaged, but instead invent casino like mechanics to force addiction of something you really do not like to do.
I understand that people like it and that's fine, but the idea that we "need" more video games that are social first and games second? No, sorry, not on board with that at all. I find it an almost ludicrous assertion (clickbait headline aside): who's going to play a social game that isn't first and foremost a good game?
I think when online came along, money came into the equation at odds with entertainment.
I think the example that most illustrated this to me was Plants vs. Zombies after EA bought them. The funny whimsical version 1 was replaced with version 2. They replaced the plants you would level up and earn with the same plants, but with a price in dollars hovering above them. You could still play through and earn them, but the equations seemed to be tweaked.
I will continue to pay for quality single-player experiences that don't rope in online or artificial grinding or monetization... (if the genre isn't slowly evaporating)
Skyrim came out in 2011, the online first/focus of at least AAA games was prevalent well before that.
I just view Skyrim as sort of a high-point in big budget single-player games (1/2 billion dollars at launch time).
Edit: I think it also requires a lot more capital to do multiplayer right, unlike single player where anybody from a hobby game dev all the way up to the big Sony studios can provide an equally satisfying experience.
I almost exclusively play single player games and still have a large backlog I've been working through the past couple of years that seems to keep getting bigger because more games keep coming out.
There's plenty of great single player games coming out. The Outer Wilds alone is one of the best single player experiences I have ever had in gaming, and that came out in 2019 (and won a Bafta for Game of the Year, so it got some recognition too).
Currently playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which is a nice long single player story that just came out a month ago.
But besides that, in the past few years there's been Disco Elysium, Person00a 5 Royal, God of War, Spider-Man, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds (different than Outer Wilds...not as good, but still worth playing), AI: The Somnium Files, Resident Evil 2 (remake), Resident Evil 3 (remake), Death Stranding, Devil May Cry 5, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Kingdom Hearts 3, Zelda: Link's Awakening Remake, Plague Tale, Shenmue III, Sinking City, Astral Chain, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Detroit: Become Human, Pillars of Eternity II, Return of the Obra Dinn, Life is Strange 2, Control, Trials of Mana... and that's just since 2018.
Doesn't even include 2017 that has amazing games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nier:Automata, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Hellblade, Night in the Woods, A Hat in Time, South Park: Fractured But Whole, Divinity: Original Sin II, Doki Doki Literature Club, Golf Story, Danganronpa v3 (but play the first two before that), Thimbleweed Park, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc.
I even had to leave out other great single player games that don't really have stories but are really good, like Into The Breach, Baba Is You, Mario Odyssey, Yoshi's Crafted World, Spyro Reignited, Mario Maker 2, hell even the game talked about in the article, Animal Crossing, can be played single player just fine.
If you can't find something you like out of everything here, then I'm not sure what type of game you're looking for. Granted, single player games aren't being pushed by EA or Activision or other major publishers, but they're still being made and are still very popular.
The internet changed the incentives because it made it trivial to steal software en masse from the public by client-servering it, and therefore there is no incentive to make high risk high definition games with lots of content when you can make low risk multiplayer games with tonnes of microtransactions.
That's what killed dedicated servers, once stupid kids started paying for skins in game or mounts in wow, that killed any incentive for game devs and publishers to make software we owned and controlled.
You have to see the internet is one giant world sized PC, two or more networked computers behave as a single machine.
So they see us as dumb terminals they can put in game/in app stores on every persons device in the world.
That was the whole plan from the beginning, to get rid of software ownership by holding back game and app files since most people are ignorant to how computers work.
They even have industry meetings about how stupid the public is:
https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...
They always wanted to take control of customers PC's and reprogram them to obey them and they have done that with Steam, mmo's (aka rebranded RPG's with a subscription and non ownership).
That's why we have uplay, origin, steam, etc.
The last 20 years has been the public committing suicide on software ownership and I've watched in horror as everyone, even my fellow nerds falling for this scam which was all part of conspiracy to take control of your computing device.
The tech industry's long term goal was to move us to an authoritarian model of computing device ownership where you no longer control the files or OS or device. That's what mobile was about.
Microsoft and the industry want to do that to the PC and windows 10 is their first version of the OS to turn the PC into a locked down platform like mobile.
To be fair, the public were also "stealing" software from the publishers.
I'm very familiar with the "information feudalism" argument you're making, and it has a valid core, but you're way overstating it especially as a conspiracy or authoritarianism. Especially if you're going against the groundbreaking UO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
And no, gamers can't "Steal" files, since the nature of comptuer files means as soon as you have a copy of a file you can't control it because files are just numbers, so to equivocate software piracy "(henceforth referred to as file copying)" as stealing is bs. We could make a good faith argument, lobbyists who wrote IP law governing software removed the publics property rights to own the software they buy (aka stealing their human rights to own the stuff they buy).
Since silicon valley has always hated other companies controlling their own software and their PC's. The history of IBM, microsoft, etc, is a history of criminality.
So no, the conspiracy is quite real. They've had these plans in the cards for a long time, they've had conferences like the below before internet of things was even a thing...
https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...
UO was not some "revolutionary new genre", it was you being illiterate, a literate consumer would have got the Renamed RPG "mmo" for a fixed price. and demanded the server exe's to run his own shards.
The fact that private UO servers exist for world of warcraft and ultima online, is proof that mmo is a fake genre invented to con the gullible out of game ownership. You just fell for the propaganda.
But how does your ideal kumbaya world, whatever that is, prevent cheating in networked games?
There's a good talk on youtube where Warren Spector talks about the original Deus Ex design and stresses that it's a linear game from a story perspective with a lot of freedom in how to design the character. The last Deus Ex went down a completely different route with a focus on a sort-of open-world story-wise which I think takes way too much tension and the ability for the writer to design the narrative out of the game.
Sounds like you just aren't into games as much anymore.
[1] Except Animal Crossing New Horizons because all my IRL friends are playing too and they added me to a Facebook group where we exchange items. I'd like this game just as much if I played single player-I did for the first month.
I don't know, someone calling me a cunt and ragequitting a Rocket League match loses its fresh, unique and special feeling after a while. And I can't really tell apart any 12-year-old French boy screaming into a $2 microphone from the next one.
I'd rather play a really scripted game than roll the dice to see what kind of a shitstorm I land into.