The Lone Wolf
//Self-satisfaction
This question keeps popping up, innuendos aside, so let’s discuss it. Single-player gaming is a much more personal experience. It’s between you and the story, and because of that solidarity you don’t have to pretend that you’re someone else. In multiplayer, you’re not who you are; you’re what other see you as. And despite the customisation of your avatar’s appearance, you never fully become a tangible being in the eyes of your fellow online gamers. Your personality and individuality are lost among the masses.
Multiplayer losses and victories are superficial. They don’t really mean anything in the long term, while their single-player counterparts are far more meaningful. They shape the fate of your character and the game world you’ve immersed yourself in. Through the single-player aspect of a game, you live and die in the world created for you, whilst in multiplayer you rarely immerse yourself in the game world at all. Instead, you experience a trivialised life and death in nothing more than a shallow environment.
Halo 3 is widely praised for its multiplayer, and although the single-player campaign is also subject to great praise, it is also criticised for it length. Some say that multiplayer excuses the flaws of the campaign, but that shouldn’t have to be the case. The multiplayer should be a great experience, but so should the single-player; no compromise should be 
made with the single player mode, and gamers shouldn’t have to make do with a less than excellent solo experience. Unless the game is specifically geared towards group play, multiplayer should be a great addition to an already great title, not a reason for inadequacy. Single-player is not just a primer for multiplayer.
//Wants turn into needs
Multiplayer, whether it’s online or local, is often expected from our games. But less games are criticised for their lack of multiplayer than their lack of single-player. Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, BioShock and Mass Effect are all games held in high regard, but none of these game feature multiplayer. They are held in high regard due to the experience the single-player provides; the developers concentrated solely on the solo aspect.
Not being distracted by multiplayer seems to be a good way of creating a solid game experience. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Battlefield 1943, and World of Warcraft are also held in high regard, this time due to their multiplayer – and ask a group of people which game is better out of both lists and the results would be too close to call. But there is a massive difference in the experience each list of games provides.
Bottom line is, as enjoyable the multiplayer games are to play, when you really consider the game as a whole, they often come across as shallow or incomplete when compared to single-player games. Why do they come off like this? Because they are incomplete: multiplayer is but a part of a complete game. Playing a game by yourself is how you truly experience the game for what it is; multiplayer allows reality to creep back, sometimes ruining the immersion. Enjoy games by yourself; be the misanthrope. Other people just water down the experience.
Developers must start concentrating on the improvement of the single-player experience. Multiplayer has reached a milestone in its ability to entertain; the experience is deeper now than it has ever been before, and the benefits of playing multiplayer are greater than ever. Multiplayer should maintain this state of adequacy, but developers should ensure single-player catches up. Make no compromises: games should be trying to create a personal experience for players to enjoy and immerse themselves in, and as important as multiplayer has become in today’s games, it is still not the most important thing to consider.
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.