The Lone Wolf
By Greg Giddens
Multiplayer has dominated our gaming experience over the last few years, and with the introduction of reliable online functionality in consoles and their games came a surge of popularity, as the PC and console crowds united for the first time in history to celebrate online gaming.
But why is online gaming so great? Why do we allow it to compromise our single-player experience? Why play with others when you can play with yourself?
//Two’s a crowd
Online gaming is starting to compromise our single-player experience, and we shouldn’t just accept this and move on. The single-player mode is not an antiquated function for developers to phase out and replace with multiplayer. In some cases, that’s a recipe for removing the soul from a game. Games have a personality. They’re like friends. When you play through the single-player component of a game, you get to know this friend, share in its joy and sorrow, and this all leads to the story the game is trying to convey.
Most modern games are story-driven, and there’s a reason for this: we enjoy the escapism of interacting with a different world. And to make this world more tangible, characters and scenarios are created for us to experience, for 
us to relate to. Then, when you switch to the multiplayer side of a game, your bond with that character is broken, and instead you now play a shell of the character you just spent time bonding with, surrounded by other shells with the same face but slightly different dressing. What’s left? Just the grind for arbitrary experience or accessories to style your shell with, just so you can be unique, like everyone else.
There’s an argument that multiplayer offers far more longevity to games, through the delivery of a more dynamic gaming experience, and there is certainly merit to that. However, with more creativity, the single player mode could easily become more dynamic, adding replayability through – for example – AI interaction and multiple storylines, or even by blurring the lines between the single- and multiplayer experiences by having an online component merged with the single-player game.
A perfect example of an innovative merger between the two would be Demon’s Souls on the PlayStation 3, which allows, through online functionality, other players to join in as temporary enemies or allies when in spirit form to regain corporeal form back on their single-player adventure. For a less innovative but no less enjoyable multiplayer enhancement to the single-player experience, it’s simple enough to turn to cooperative play through the single-player mode, a feature that’s been seen in a wide variety of games throughout the medium’s history. The point is, the single-player experience needn’t be solely that. The addition of seamless multiplayer options within the core experience enhances the enjoyment, taking the benefits from the two modes and combining them.
//Can’t we have both?
Often, it’s the experience of immersion in a game that counts. Single-player offers that natively, whilst multiplayer tends not to; it has a different focus. I’m not saying multiplayer should change, but I am saying that single-player should not be overlooked. Multiplayer can be deep – the aforementioned co-operative play through the single-player campaign, for example, allows you to have a personal experience with a game while still having human and AI interaction, and games that create a persistent online world for players to shape also show more depth. Tom Clancy’s End War, for example, features a dynamic world map where players fight for regions. In this game, and similar titles, one person can make a difference, much like how you can make a difference in the single-player game mode. A deeper multiplayer component is often the result of enhancing the single-player experience with more players, rather than creating a new and more hollow experience on top of the single-player.
[Continues...]
Hurrah Someone said it. I totally agree, i don’t like hoe gaming has become more and more multiplayer orientated. For various reasons i love single Player, One Because I can imemrse myself in a good story and world and enjoy all of it. And two I’m definitly not that great at games so everytime I’m in a multiplayer setting people see how rubbish I truly am at games. With single player I don’t mind because I can take down the diffuculty or umm cheat.
I don’t like co-op either, sometimes it ruins the single player game like in RE5 you just couldn’t play without another teamate because the AI was rubbish. And also it takes something out of the game…your kind of forced to follow the guy your with and if there fast you have to be fast which means you can miss out a lot of stuff if you were playing on your own and going by your own pace.
I find that in MMOs a lot where I can’t read the quest text because there already off 5 miles down the road and so I have to catch up to them taking the story of MMOs away from me. So I say do more single player games.
See, I’m not so sure. There’s certainly a trend towards multiplayer in many modern console titles – and Nintendo’s current output is certainly geared towards social play.
But, particularly on the PC, I think we’re seeing a new wave of tremendous single-player experiences created with a wide range of purposes. And I don’t think that trend is going to change any time soon.
The PC market certainly seems to be the exception but my concern is that the PC’s influence on gaming has diminished and the consoles are now leading the way.
Its interesting because the PC market has already had its revolution in multiplayer gaming, games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, the console market is now catching up and having a revolution of its own. So perhaps consoles leading the way is an illusion, they’re still following in the PC’s footsteps, but the shift of influence is making consoles seem like the innovator, and with the console market setting the trend the single player experience may suffer if its overlooked or suppressed.
Revolution’s an ongoing process in our medium, I think, but to me the vast majority of innovation remains on the PC. The problem the PC has in this day and age is that shop retail is collapsing – every passing month, almost, shops give over more shelf space to console games and less and less to PC games, so the latter have been almost phased out entirely in some places. It’s this omnipresence of console games in shops and advertised on TV which makes them seem so dominant which in a sense they are, and yet I think it’s the diversity and technolgical and creative openness of the PC sphere that is really paving the way to the future in terms of both single player and multiplayer. As flashy as they may appear, consoles have always been playing catch-up, especially in the multiplayer realm.
I’m not so sure that SP gaming is under threat. Yes, a few games have arguably been compromised to an extent as they were skewed towards MP (CoD 4 springs to mind) but by the same token I think there are still as many deep and rewarding singleplayer focused games now as there ever were, even if multiplayer is (inevitably) rising in prominence. There aren’t as many Baldur’s Gates and such as there once was, but the market has changed. It’s only that occasional tendency to compromise one side in favour of the other when both ought to be good that potentially worries me, I think solely SP and solely MP games are in rude health on PC and consoles, and the same is broadly true for those that try to do both.