Most gamers prefer single-player games
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there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar.
1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc.
2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps.
3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited.
4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game.
5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player.
6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader.
I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair.
But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.
Can you share an example of this outside of mobile games?
2. mobile game
3. mobile game
4. not actually pay to win.
5. noncompetitive game
6. mobile game
You see where I'm going. You can't relate "has microtransactions" with "is pay to win". They're different.
Again, can you provide an example? Also
> Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree
Is just blatantly incorrect, unless you just mean "One player is further in the game than the other", in which case literally all games are "competitive", including single player.
I can but I won't, because I'm done with this conversation based on the inauthentic responses.
Exactly as expected.
So you can essentially skip half your character's progression arc by entering a credit card number.
Now, you can argue that the best gear is BOP (Bind on Pickup) so this isn't a huge factor, but there's still definitely an aspect of "pay to win", since there are plenty of other things you need gold for that payment skips.
You can also argue that WoW isn't competitive, but all multiplayer games have a light competition of being ahead of others in progression, even if it's not direct competition. (I'm ignoring PvP because actual PvP is a tiny minority interest. )
That didn't stop players from figuring out how to pay to win though. They now pay "boosting" and "carry" services - other people who group up with you and then clear dungeons while you just follow along behind them and collect the loot as it drops.
There are advertisers spamming ads for these carry services all over the place inside the game even though they're against ToS. It does still have its charms but on balance WoW really has become a train wreck.
Do you have a recommendation for something better that's subscription based?
What did bother me was (1) games taking too long (I don’t want to tell my family I can’t help with anything for 45 minutes) and (2) jerks. In ranked there were the people who thought they could not get ahead because the players they played with (me) sucked, in unranked there were too many people who couldn’t queue successfully (learned how to play all positions, even jungle, so I wouldn’t be part of the problem of having three people who want to play top)
There, changed it to the proper format.
I've seen plenty of glitches in LAN games with friends that were completely unfair, but never were a problem.
I prefer MMOs, but playing solo.
I still (very) occasionally play WoW, and that's pretty much the only game I ever play.
I'd love to try a new MMO, but they're all "free-to-play" meaning "pay to win". I just want to pay a normal monthly subscription price and explore cool worlds. Maybe interact occasionally with some other people in a guild or pickup group or something.
It's what keeps my WoW subscription active, even though I rarely play it.
Sadly, it's gotten so bad that I spend most of my brain-dead time reading Lit RPG stuff, because at least with that I can recapture some of the sense of wonder and excitement that we had during the golden age of MMOs (UO, EQ, DAOC, AC, SWG, etc...).
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a shot.
a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear.
this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
We still get our fair share of season passes and day one DLCs, so it's not total immunity.
EDIT: typo meant non-competitive co-op
If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE
ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count.
This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency.
So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika.
They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update.
Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
I don't think I've ever seen a game company ever manage to put 100% of their changes in a CHANGELOG.
FromSoftware games like to put in cheese border-line bullshit mechanics to make you feel good when you overcome them, even if you have to cheese them yourself. They knew everybody was going to cheese regardless of the difficulty they just made a round-about way of making you feel like it was okay.
Some people like competitiveness in games, and like difficult games, and thats okay if you do or don't. Games need to find a product-market fit just like anything else.
They can be as competitive or as casual as you like, are "soft-multiplayer", essentially single player inside a multiplayer economy, and the better ones are non-p2w.
I don’t feel comfortable doing that unless the chance of an interruption is extremely close to zero. Stresses me out.
If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
...team pvp or even coop games need much more commitment.
SP? Hit the pause button and go.
One game I'm dominating against the other team, but then the ball hits the other side and get paired with people above my level for the next several. It kinda makes me feel like the agency on how well I can perform is taken away from me, and I just have to hope the matchmaking system takes pity.
At least when matches were more random, sometimes I'd get paired with people above my level, but it was rare that it felt completely rigged against me.
My wife uses video games to relax and de-stress after having dealt with customers all day. Having to deal with more people in the evening is the last thing she needs.
people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
All of this never existed in mine or your days when our parents just knew that video games would ruin us with no way of making money in them. Even the dream of becoming a game developer wasn't even a thing.
Already at that point many of my friends were pretty competitive, even though neither of us really had the means to become HeatoN even if we tried. I think this must have been early 2000s something I think?
These days "play online" so often means "play with complete strangers you've never talked to before and most likely never will again".
Even for large popular games like Unreal Tournament you typically joined a set of favourite servers, and had the same set of "regulars" hanging around.
It's like old-school relatively small-scale forums vs. reddit or Twitter.
You can still kind-of get this experience if you try hard enough, but it's not really the default and typically nothing is geared towards it.
As an aside I miss the old days, but i also found grinding overwatch and eventually leveling up in my mid 30s (pre kids) to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in spite of the unmanaged toxicity. I don't have any competitive gamer friends and the match play i dislike also made it possible to experience something i think i would not otherwise have had access to.
(And Heaton is a dick, just saying.)
I got into online gaming with Cs 1.6 and cs:cz normal online was kinda competitive but you had a lot of joke maps or non competive ones(climbing maps). I don't think they're as popular now since a lot of games have matchmaking and ranked unlocks as the default multilayer. I'm way out of the loop mind you, I learn a lot more to PvE multilayer now(left4dead and deep rock)
This made online games essentially a public place, where people might even get to know each other and "hang out", and you could join the same people day after day, get to know habits, make friends and rivals, etc. It was extremely low competitiveness, and nothing that happened really mattered. It didn't matter if you sucked or were amazing, because you would likely end up on the team with everyone in the server at some point, so people got wildly different gameplay experiences. This even meant that different servers could target different styles of play. You could go to the really tryhard team deathmatch servers with carefully balanced maps and active admin management for cheaters and balance purposes, or you could join the match on cramped Beaver Creek with zero shields and infinite shotguns and rockets, where average lifespan was measured in tenths of seconds, but that chaos was a great breather if you didn't feel competitive that day.
No matter how shitty you were, you could find a community that felt right to you, and you were likely to even dominate occasionally when you had good days and got lucky, so that even people who suck at the game felt the high of victory.
Nowadays, game devs insist not being utterly steamrolled by minute thirty is "not fun", and enforce near perfect a perfect 1:1 win/loss ratio through matchmaking systems, where you never see the same player twice, so they don't exist as fellow humans in your mind but as hostile "agents" that you must struggle against, and everyone feels average because your instantaneous success is basically driven by who got the advantage in the random matchmaking process. Everyone is forced to feel average about their performance, because everyone is forcibly given an average experience.
A lot of that existed long before now, but it was always opt-in. If you wanted custom servers, you could go have that fun and chaos, but if you were feeling competitive, you could jump into matchmaking and have the enforced global balance of that system give you specific matches you were emotionally prepared for and explicitly seeking out.
BUT..... companies had to get rid of custom servers, because it's way harder to sell digital items for a game if players can just go on private and custom servers that turn off or disable the checks for if you have "purchased" whatever skin you want to wear. All the bullshit A/B testing and metrics companies have made up to assure us that "people like this better" is just to defend their business strategy.
Nope. I nope out of any of that.
No DMing, no chats? No thanks. Why play a social game you can't socialize in?
Hackers and trolls? There's zero tools for fighting them and you can't host yourself.
It's no wonder most gamers prefer single player, there's hardly any fun multi-player games.
The worst part is with constant updates you can buy a game and then have it changed into pay2win later. At least with single player you might be able to keep playing the old version.
I dislike pay2win, but the logic behind that sentence could be used to rule out lots, maybe even the majority, of games..,
Not just things like Eurotruck Simulator or Farming Sim or whatever, but games in general tend to be "more of what yo get in real life, but altered". From sports games to car racing to battles fought with weapons... people do find simulated reality to be a good escape.
Yes, but those simulations are fair and not pay2win, so this isn't more of the same.
So you see that and see why companies push so hard for that space. maintaining one game is also cheaper than trying to make new AAA games every 2-5 years and MP games provide a steady revenue stream. A subscription without calling it a subscription.
Game companies try to solve this with so-called "skill based matchmaking[1]" which purports to match you with other players of similar skill, but I've never seen it actually work. Every game is full of sweats who somehow have cracked SBMM so that they get into games with less-skilled players like me and punch way below their weight.
I wish games would just go back to letting the user choose their own difficulty level. Sad that that's kind of gone out of fashion.
If you get a friend or two together who don't mind oldies, the old Tom Clancy games (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell) are a blast to play through in coop too.
Well, sort of. PvE just means "player vs environment", a holdover/loan word from MMOs where that was the default, vs being able to attack other players in PvP areas.
When applied to shooters, though, typically it means that the game was designed around asymmetric battles between players and AI enemies. Asymmetric means that the enemies aren't just bots taking the place of humans, with the same rules, weapons, health, etc. Instead, they are usually a mix of different enemy types... easy to kill grunts, the occasional sniper, the melee berserker, and of course the "bullet sponge" bosses that take forever to kill and feel more like old MMO raids than a normal opponent in a shooter. They're not meant to simulate real players (even shitty ones), but to give more of a feel of a traditional video game campaign. For like the super-boiled-down version of this, Serious Sam is just endless hordes of enemy types running at you. A more modern take would be the roguelite shooter genre, like Risk of Rain 2 or Gunfire Reborn, which offers only endless combat and not much else. The other titles I mentioned usually have some sort of story and some form of permanent progression in the form of new weapons, abilities, etc.
If that isn't what you want, then yeah, it's bots in regular PvP shooters that you'll have to look for :( I think they are relatively rare these days, but you can still play the old Unreal Tournaments, Quakes, Doom, etc.
Early FPSes like Wolfenstein, Doom, and the Marathon trilogy were primarily about killing asymmetric AI enemies—and even sometimes (moreso in the Marathon games) progressing through a story.
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If you are interested and don't have the time to catch up with a bunch of gaming-related content (news, reviews, articles, etc) take a look at my newsletter, it might be something that is a good fit for you.
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But also yes, modern consoles do have a suspend feature. PC's can't do it as easily because of various Windows API issues, I assume.
I think it’s less about player experience, though, but more about save system complexity (how much data needs to be persisted), aka lower dev costs.
It's complicated but also not a spot to skimp out on. So the incremental cost to design it as anytime isn't that much more than a checkpoint. Most modern games have pretty lax save systems anyway (basically anywhere that isn't a battle), so I feel it's becoming more of a moot problem.
The Xbox One and above are a really funny shaped Windows machine with HyperV underneath.
* cheap out on development: essentially just have a few low detail maps that people play constantly
* people want to look “unique” so you can charge them for near-zero-cost assets
* people don’t complain when you say “must have an internet connection”
All of which are garbage reasons to me and just mean fewer good games, and less reason to buy them (I’m uninterested in buying a game if it is just going to stop working in a year because they’re no longer selling it).
If I want to be subject to swearing and shitty behavior is just become a high school teacher.
* Committed playerbase that stays around for a long time
* Dev time focused on making new assets and gamemodes etc. rather than needing to develop entire new games
* Designed with an intentional grind (leveling systems, battle passes, random drop chances) which slows down player progression to acquire before-mentioned aesthetic items or even mechanically important upgrades, can provide shortcuts via payment
Of course, new live services are sinking now because each one depends on attention economy. If potential players are already committed to a different live service, they don't have the time or interest to re-commit to some other new one.
We've been watching for years now as major companies sink millions into games that are DOA because they never actually had an audience willing to commit to yet another major continuing time investment that these games represent.
Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades, Tunic / Death’s Door… Indie is where it’s at man.
The only AAA I’ve loved in years was Red Dead 2… my horse :(
Xenoblade and monolith as a whole has been amazing for RPGs post nintendo acquisition. And Splatoon is super popular these days (but is very MP centric).
Thing is Nintendo doesn't really need to make new franchises every other year like Sony. their new, semi-known franchises from the last decade has been Splatoon and ARMS. But they constantly reinvent their old IPs and tend to give it sufficient time to bake. Stuff like Breath of the Wild may as well have been a different franchise for what a departure it was from the Zelda formula.
Also helps they can just dig in their wine closet and bring out some untouched scotch. It can take out F Zero, Kid Icarus, Golden Sun, Warioland, Mother, and a dozen other franchises and they may as well feel new to the next generation. Sony instead abandoned all their talent and moved HQ.
I own a PS5, and the absolute most fun I've had on the system is Astro Bot, followed closely by Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart. Everything else I've enjoyed has either been a PS4 game or an indie game.
But stuff like Astro, Splatoon, Ratchet and Clank, whatever latest Mario title, anything Rabbids or Rayman, etc. don't speak to me at all anymore. I never played R&C in any of the Playstation generations, and I never liked Crash Bandicoot when I tried that. I sort of remember liking Spyro when it was contemporary.
Given the selection bias of who publishes what games where, it's hardly a surprise to me that I'm not getting much mileage out of my Switch. Nintendo feels like a brand that's tailored most of all for my kid nephew and any appealing titles for me are largely exceptional.
At the time, I was just starting to think of video games as an art form in addition to a source of entertainment, and the blatant fad-chasing I was seeing across nearly the entire industry turned my stomach. Of course the same thing had happened many times before and has happened many times since, but I wasn't in my formative years for any of those.
I can’t even come close to keeping up with the probably-good entries in either category, film or single-player(-friendly) games. They could stop making more and it would be quite a while before that was any kind of problem for me. My backlog gets a ton larger every year.
Some of the good ones are even Hollywood movies. They just might not be action movies (sometimes they are!) or might not have a super-sized marketing budget, so I guess lots of folks only see the handful that get advertised heavily and figure those are the only movies, but even Wikipedia or IMDB’s list of films released each year are looooong and they don’t capture everything.
What else should I look for?
SP games are fine for gamers outside of the $70 price increase (which I'm fine with), but apparently it's getting harder and harder to profit from SP these days. Not surprising with longer dev times, larger dev teams, and a stagnation of the console market.
Though so are plenty of single player games.
As game developers and publishers have consolidated into mega corps this line just isn't true anymore. You need a billion dollar game to move the corporate needle these days. It's a very similar dynamic to what has happened in Hollywood. All the mid-budget projects are being squeezed out and you either go very low budget/indie or you go huge budget and swing for the fences. There is no career reward in the current corporate marketplace for modest wins.
But it doesn't follow that the live service aspect is what killed the games. Games are cancelled all the time.
And then saying there's an industry trend but what's brought up is how those games were cancelled, not brought down by the user sentiment of live services.
And their data point is a 53% preference? It just seems poorly argued to me.
I think the mistake being made is instead of opting to build a cheaper, higher quality single player games they opt to created an expensive, AAA live service (for a minute they were calling them Destiny killers) -- which is a tough landing to stick. You'll notice that the success stories took long investments Fortnite's pivot from a grindy co-op game to a genre defining battle royale or maybe even Apex's stealth development and launch.
Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim. So the question these studios have to ask is "can I make a game that will get people to put down Skyrim or Civ V." That's a big ask.
I've long tried not to buy every console, because it gets expensive for no good reason. So as our Switch is aging, I metaphorically poked my head up and put my finger to the wind... and decided our "next console" is the Steam Deck I already owned. And a big part of that decision is new games are frankly not any better than old games. They look better, and that's it, and that often comes at the cost of the real interactivity of the game anyhow.
I wouldn't put a specific date on it, but game tech basically plateaued 10-15 years ago, even if the numbers keep going up. The graphics were good enough, especially if strong art direction knew how to use them. The tech for creating great games was basically all in place, and we got to where having 10 times the polygons just wasn't important anymore. Games are a lot more like movies to me now... I don't sit there looking at "was this movie 2021 or 2023?" as if that's going to indicate an important difference in quality, and games are getting to be that way for me.
you don't even need a study, just check out Steam's most played games as of this posting:
- DOTA 2 is #3, PUBG is right under it.
- Rust is 5.5 years old and #9. Apex is a bit newer but still #10.
- Baldur's Gate 3 is a single player game over a year old (and AFAIK, it's major updates are finished), and today is still top 15.
- and of course GTA V is still #11, a game that has now spanned 3 generations.
When you make a big game, it captures people for a very long time. That's what companies are trying to do when they chase Fortnite.
An extremely old build (that still demonstrates the core gameplay) is available on itch.io if anyone is unsure that they might like it.
The dev is doing some weird anime campaign that they seem to be heavily invested in, but I don't really care. I paid for the game I wanted long ago.
Shared screen co-op is annoyingly difficult to find since "couch co-op" doesn't differentiate split screen versus shared screen and we strongly dislike split screen.
Story co-op is increasingly difficult to find. When you do find them, they tend to be less campaign or story and more "repeated encounter" scenarios (e.g., Insurgent). There is nothing like the strategically deliberate plan and work together pace of Wildlands since Wildlands.
Worse, recent co-op campaign games tend to be add-on modes to PvP, meaning you have to contend with ridiculous "balance" boosts and nerfs so nothing works like it should if it was a single player game. PvE should not be "balanced" this way.
It definitely ticks the "co-op story" game box though, and is overall a great game.
Like for Pikmin where in the later editions there were multiple main characters on the field that you could switch between. How was there not a local co-op where each player could use a main character?
Multiplayer games are of course not strictly local software, but their experience extends beyond software itself into forming an abstract community of people. You might come on to a multiplayer game and enjoy it for a time, but its in its nature that this community will shift. The casuals move on to newer titles that have all the other casuals on it now. The greybeards left playing halo 3 today are total sweats now who stomp you every time you have a happy memory of getting a killstreak 15 years ago and foolishly open master chief collection.
Balance fixes (yes, in single player games) show that this is not always the case. Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring have both had several gameplay tactics nerfed.
These days, I generally avoid games that are multiplayer-only, and for games with multiplayer elements, I try to avoid those and focus on single-player elements instead.
It could be selection bias based on my gaming preferences, of course, but based on feedback I've heard from others who play games that I do not, it seems to be largely the same everywhere multiplayer is involved.
Major factor IME. If you're playing any AAA or one of the top-10-or so FPSes or MOBAs, sure. Hanging out with friends when they're playing online multiplayer less in-fashion older and indie games: Very little of that if any, there.
I'm with you, but to make a (competely arbitrary) parallel: It's possible to love R&B music but still have a miserable time when you go to a concert with The Weeknd because you don't vibe with the crowd and you think the party sucks. That doesn't mean you can't have a good time going out to live shows in general and find parties you enjoy with people you vibe with.
Similarly, I love clubbing but have absolutely 0 interest going to any of the major couple of venues that catch the bigger crowds in town.
Doesn't mean the party scene is dead.
It's pretty easy to filter out "toxic" games if you filter out anything which has a ranked mode and is not designed to be played infinitely.
Unfortunately, games in the online era have trended in that direction, because they are the most profitable.
For example, some variables that affect toxicity: - competitiveness, often implemented by sort of ranked system, but also just any sort of head-to-head competition. Tournaments and betting will do this as well. - longer investment (via playtimes, either of a single "run" or in total) - people won't get mad at a 5-10 minute game as much as a 1 hour game. Games as a service like MMOs where people have 1000s of hours of playtime are the extreme end of this. - punishing gameplay, where a mistake can cause you to lose a lot of progress (Hardcore modes where dying means you have to restart your character, for example) - tone (casual vs serious tone, e.g. Fall Guys vs Call of Duty) - More serious generally results in more toxicity.
Adjusting these variables can even turn a single player game into a toxic one (e.g. self-imposed challenges/achievements, Dark Souls, Jump King or Getting Over It).
Similarly, you can lower the stakes so that the gameplay doesn't devolve into toxicity, even with multiplayer (e.g. Animal Crossing)
"Abstract: Toxicity is a widespread phenomenon in competitive online video games. In addition to its direct undesirable effects, there is a concern that toxicity can spread to others, amplifying the harm caused by a single player’s misbehavior. In this study, we estimate whether and to what extent a player’s toxic speech spreads, causing their teammates to behave similarly. To this end, we analyze proprietary data from the free-to-play first- person action game Call of Duty®: Warzone™. We formulate and implement an instrumental variable identification strategy that leverages the network of interactions among players across matches. Our analysis reveals that all else equal, all of a player’s teammates engaging in toxic speech increases their probability of engaging in similar behavior by 26.1 to 30.3 times the average player’s likelihood of engaging in toxic speech. These findings confirm the viral nature of toxicity, especially toxic speech, in competitive online video games."
My taste in games has changed too as I've gotten older - I find myself mostly playing a mix of older games, story rich RPGs and indie titles - eg things like Tyranny, Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, OpenTTD, Rimworld, Slay the Spire... twitchy FPS games just don't do it for me any more.
So this article's main findings (the splits by age) definitely fits with me - I'm out of the <25 age group and have been for a while ;)
Online gaming used to be about having fun. And while those communities definitely still exist, the landscape is dominated by "competitive" gaming that brings out the worst in people.
The relentless pushing of "battle passes," in-gaming loot crate gambling, and in-game upgrades using real-life money from game publishers.
There's also the whole "you can't pause real life" thing. Much easier to play online when you're young and don't have real responsibilities - but that's not a luxury most adults have.
- higher spending cap. for minimal effort you can refresh battle passes and other monetization post launch. Making DLC for a single player game still takes effort to design and polish. And despite online protest, a lot of people clearly buy these.
- longevity. Single player games have the same curves as ever where they make big sales in the first few months and peter out to a trickle by the time it's out for a year. And these are games that take multiple years to make at the AAA level.a successful MP game can run for years and merely iterate instead of re-invent entire campaigns and character designs.
- external events/ads. some top games try to do an e-sports gauntlet to engage people and further cement their brand. they can release 3rd party skins to bring up player numbers. They can benefit more from streamers. At best, a SP game can try some collaboration content, which is much larger scale and may not create much buzz.
Imagine my surpise when GfWL lost all my save games halfway through. Why? Who knows. Maybe an GfWL update? Maybe a game update? I severely reduced my gaming after that and have been adamant for true standalone games only (thank you GOG games).
Note: I do not mind multiplayer online games. I have been known to play DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online) off and on.
In contrast, single player campaigns (or co-op campaigns for that matter) are often story driven. They have a beginning and an end. They offer catharsis. If it's good, you may play through it again, but it will end eventually.
I will sometimes play multiplayer games with my nephews, but would always prefer to play by myself. If I'm playing a game I want it to be fun and not stressful. When everything is a competition, it's stressful. There's not letting up, no lazy laps... you have to try to win.
They often want me to play Minecraft with them. I "forget" to bring my laptop a lot. When I played Minecraft in the past it was always on peaceful and I'd just build stuff. It was a giant sandbox of digital legos for me, or I'd try and make weird stuff with redstone. They have all these monsters turned on, want to go into these boss battles, and they never give me any weapons (and disable my ability to get my own) so I just die over and over again trying to run from things with no defenses. It's awful. Half the time I just stop playing and stare the the screen, like wtf do you want me to do here...
I'm sure the industry hates the idea that most people prefer single players games, because then they can't justify their online services, so they are incentivized to push multiplayer games and make people think that's what they like.
It was somewhat effective.
I'm not complaining per se. It's just interesting that the game is able to have that dynamic in it.
They're older now, it's much less of an issue, but I still mandate that PvP stays off at all times. Though it is a useful lesson in the mechanics of escalation, I suppose.
(Specifically, you always value harm to yourself more than you value harm to others, even your family, so when someone does "1" damage to you, you perceive it as "2", then you try to retaliate with "2" damage but they perceive it as "4" damage for the same reason, and now you're stuck in an escalating loop. There are ways out of this loop, of course, but it takes time. This rather simple model explains a rather distressing amount of international politics and history....)
My nephews of course would use this against me. I’d get away into a calm area and they’d teleport me right into the middle of hell.
I have the complete opposite experience with Minecraft. My kids play peaceful flat land creative and it's the most boring thing to me. I'll take boss fights without weapons any day.
Flat land creative is boring. I agree with you there. I would use a normal world and explore it a bit, find a good spot to make my home, mine for materials, create a store room for all of stuff getting mined, make secret entrances that would trigger with pistons and stuff, things like that. I guess some people might find that boring too, but I found it pretty relaxing. Of course this was usually just something to do on the side, while something else was going on. As a singular focus I won't do it.
I used to work a job with a lot of downtime, so it was perfect for that. Something to fill the time, but easy to pick up and put down as needed, and I could still keep an eye on what was going on at work to know if I needed to do something.
Speaking as my 2018 self, I grew quickly bored of single player games and felt most were not worth the money. Pay $60 and maybe get a week or two’s worth of entertainment. I was never into replaying static content or grinding for meaningless badges or trophies.
Meanwhile multiplayer games have significantly more dynamic playtime for the money.
I can’t speak for the state of gaming in 2024 though.
But that causes more outrage on social media, even though the wisdom statistics state that the top 10% spenders can make up half the revenue of a game.
Chances, that you'll deal with problems and unwilling changes are higher than just start an offline single-player game.
That's why I buy games exclusively on gog.com.
It sounds weird, and not what most people would consider as "gaming" but all of those were a mix of solo & coop since they had a social aspect but totally playable alone (well, KingsOfChaos would be kind of silly to play alone).
It seems like only the OG runescape still has some sort of following, the other ones died out (there was a different one with space ships and planets and power levels, but I forget the name - same principle as Outwar and KingsOfChaos).
There was also a Russian one based on the Dozory universe (Night Watch) by Sergey Lukianenko (one of my favorite authors), but that mostly turned into a cash grab which is a bummer because it's one of the coolest game concepts out there - it has been my dream that someone actually makes that game.
The online experience is great compared to even a few years ago (when it wasn't acceptable), but not perfect in terms of loading times and lag.
Which is ironic given that Asian games have the biggest whales, but Asia was always 2 steps ahead with lootboxes. The skins in SF6 look great, but they are definitely banking on the fact that <5% of the active players will even consider buying them.
I do think multiplayer is super hard to make broadly rewarding. High skill players quickly come to dominate, often in brutal ways. I enjoyed some Star Wars: Battlefront 2 but man, a couple players who knows what they are doing rack up kills quick to earn a hero character respawn, & can often just own the heck out of most players quite well. Figuring out how you can drop good experiences for medium & low skill players is super hard.
Exactly. Real life has enough "repeated failure despite best effort." Why would I want more of it in a video game I play for enjoyment?
If I'm playing online, I prefer to play with my friends (not strangers). Arranging time so everyone is available is very difficult.
I do miss LAN parties.
I only play single player stuff and have a backlog that just keeps increasing, I can't keep with the pace. They aren't the most publicized AAA titles though (BG3 probably bring an exception given its popularity, and the Zeldas thanks to Nintendo).
It's just like music, where there's plenty of good one being made, but can't be found anywhere close to the top 10 hits or on radio (at least, for the kind of music I like).
So yeah... One can dream, but the dream is, for once, alive (mostly thanks to GoG, Steam and Humble).
What's the disconnect? If dozens or hundreds of people intimately familiar with the project say it's no good, why don't you listen to them?
[0] in my mind's eye, mustachioed, smoking a cigar, and fanning himself with hundred-dollar bills
I never really had much enjoyment with playing with strangers on the internet. Most of them are much better at these games than I am, and it's just way too stressful. I also have some hesitation trash-talking total strangers, but I'm perfectly fine doing that with close friends.
The problem is that, to properly milk the whales, you have to follow specific strategies that encourage their "I'm better than you because I paid $100 instead of wasting 100 hours" mentality, which means you have to make it suck to not be a whale so that the whales can feel so superior, and to help drive potential whales into entering their payment info and becoming milkable whales.
That means that non-whale players, the majority, have to treat the game as a part time job just to keep up with released content (which is partially enforced by the game or community) or else just not get to experience the majority of the game. The game requires more effort per unit of "fun" you want to experience because it has to in order to trigger the whale catching effects.
However, most people only have time in their life for one of these part time jobs, including the whales, which means the market is fixed. There's only enough player time and whale money to support a small, fixed number of these games. That's why they keep failing, there are strong network effects, and nobody wants to "invest" in a new game.
> It's a lot harder to make a book have depth and complexity than it is for going to a party, since you don't have human conversation partners.
It depends on the book and the party. Similarly, maybe there is more depth and complexity to Dwarf Fortress than there is to Rocket League. (Not to pick on RL in particular, it is just the first thing that came to mind.)
"I Don't Want To Be A Product Of My Environment. I Want My Environment To Be A Product Of Me."
Frank Costello - The Departed.
(Although I do not quite grasp the intended relation of the idea to gaming. I would say it's a matter of one's own private time with oneself, one's own rhythm...)
MP games play on a server that updates to its desire. you like that cool gun? it can be nerfed tomorrow. Like this strategy? well, competitive gamers can hard counter it and kill you every time. you can "take a break" by getting a good night's rest and fall in rankings overnight.
Single player games can be played on your time, your way, and (most) glitches/exploits you may find won't be patched out one day. Some games even added back in some glitches on behalf of speedrunners' requests. Even linear games can have you craft your own experience on what you did when and how you reacted. It's "your" experience. But a shared enough experience that everyone can relate and talk about it. a year 1 pvp meta may be ancient history to a year 3 meta.
That's what I took out of it.
What I hate about multi-player is when you have to play the game with others to be successful (exceptions made for those very few big bosses). I'm mostly a MMORPG player. I don't want to be in a clan or guild. I don't want to find other people to play with. I just want to log on whenever I want and play for as long or as little as I want. But, I want to be able to buy stuff in an economy.
I'm in my 40s and don't put in the effort to be competitive in multiplayer games. I have great admiration for the developers and the players who participate.
In Hearthstone, MTG, SF etc I play alone, single player, against someone who might as well be a bot