General Discussion

http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/007031.html

Would you care if single-player games like BioShock and Oblivion suddenly became extinct? Former Sony exec and current Infogrames honcho Phil Harrison thinks that's where we're headed. Imagine: Grand Theft Auto IV bereft of its single-player story mode, Halo without its epic solo campaign, Mario without…well, whatever you want to call the single-player business Mario gets up to butt-stomping Goombas and whipping fireballs at Koopa Troopas across spinning, tilting fantasy-scapes.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Harrison said the following:

I don't think the industry is going to make many more of those. I just don't think consumers want to be playing games that don't have some kind of network connectivity to them, or some kind of community embedded in them, or some kind of extension available through downloadable content.

Now, that's not to criticise Alone in the Dark - it's just to recognise the industry is changing, and the role we play as creators and publishers has to reflect those changes. I don't think I'm alone in having those views, either.

And indeed he isn't. Former Ultima Online lead designer and Star Wars Galaxies creative director Raph Koster took some flak (from me and plenty others) for claiming as much a couple years ago. Said Koster:

Single-player gaming is doomed, because already today, the large crowd playing Solitaire is doing it online, whilst chatting in a chat room, because they can; because the RPG player is doing it whilst chatting with friends about the plot in a chat room, because they can; because fundamentally, the vast majority of humans want human contact even if only fleeting. We want to know where we stand compared to everyone else, whether what we like matches what the world likes, and whether or not others care that we are there.

I don't know. I intuitively get what Koster's saying about single-player gamers being introverts and how all that's changed with multiplayer pulling in a totally new crowd. I get what a lot of people keep saying about the "millennial" generation being inherently connected and hive-minded. And I get what Harrison's implying between the lines about single-player games being costly, increasingly risky endeavors.

But I think it's important to bear in mind that these guys aren't track-record visionaries, and particularly in Harrison's case, more like businessmen with microphones. Entrepreneurs with vested financial imperatives. Their job isn't to tell you how it ought to be in some pure philosophical space, it's to tell you how they'd prefer it to be, and it should come as no surprise that both are working like mad on major multiplayer initiatives. If multiplayer gaming were doomed, just to play devil's advocate, they'd each be out of a job, in other words.

So the question, fellow gamers, is what's your pleasure? Do you still want companies like Bethseba and Rockstar to be making games you at least have the option to play without the participation of others? Or do you see a transition to games you only play with others as the inevitable terminus for this industry?

Oblivion does have a large community that will stick with it for years.  mainly the mods, lots of forums, ect.   However the console version of Oblivion will die out a year or three sooner.

Playing Mass Effect for the PC right now.

I have no worries :)

Most mmo's are pretty much single player nowadays anywho.

He is not saying that there will be more and more MMO's just that there will be more games with a multiplayer aspect to them or with downloadable content or mods and such. No one likes buying a $50 or more dollar game to find out you only get 20 hours of gameplay and that's it. No real replay value, etc. With multiplayer you get more gameplay....basically he just saying gamers want more content which is true.

I believe that there will always be a place for the single player game in the video game industry.

Well, I'd say that games that are exclusively single player with no multiplayer options may lose their market share, but there are things that single player RPGs can do that a multiplayer version of them could not do.

I think more and more games will have both a single player mode and a multiplayer mode, as say Civ IV has.

You'll note that MMOs increasingly cater to solo players, because forming PUGs is not easy and making all the content dependent on group play is impractical and will hurt sales long term.

So there's going to be a happy medium that provides for both the single play/solo experience and a multiplayer experience as well.

hell... i play more single-player games anymore then i do mmo's.

lets see here... recently i've played through again:

Assassins Creed

Lost Odyssey

Mass Effect

KOTOR I&II

Xenogears

Jak & Daxter series (dont knock it till you play em')

Skies of Arcadia

and thats just a list from the last 6 months. no... i dont play them straight through and on to the next... i sometimes jump around... but i've played more of them and gotten almost more enjoyment out of them then i have mmo's within the last past year.

hell... if mass effect had a co-op mode i'd be on another play-through of that right now... and yes, that is a multi-player mode, but its still a single player game. it'd just be fun to do tactics.

  There will always be a market for content which can be easily accessed and quickly consumed.  I CAN see how a multiplayer aspect will attempt to work its way into everything.  In many ways, if properly done, such an aspect COULD work its way into everything successfully.  I do NOT, however, think that the designers in ANY market have enough of a clue as to how to MAKE such a thing work yet.  We can barely make the simplistic MMO structure work, hell...the XBL crap outplays it at every turn.  Think about how many truly horrid games the achievements list has found players playing.  Given what I see in our industry...I think that almost everything is running stagnate, and that we are trying to use these multiplayer aspects to salvage what is, otherwise, the most apparent case of writers block I have ever seen.

  Right now, we aren't using Multiplayer for anything more than a bandaid to fix the fact that we have run out of ideals to improve the games anymore.