Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional jerks, I can just do things in the real world. Single-player gaming is more comfy.
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.
You can always solo queue fortnight/apex or whatever. The worst case is you die cause you had to deal with the kid/cat/work call, if you focus on the fun of the individual engagements and don't worry about actually winning the match you'll have fun. I do understand what you're saying, multiplayer gaming does require much more intentionality. You have to make distraction free time to get the most out of it, especially if you're playing a team game there's a social contract to have the time to play the match out.
This is the big one to me, time commitment. People spend hours on these, and if you want to "hang" with an in-group, they expect you to put in the time. No thanks. I don't want a lifestyle revolving around maximizing time on a multiplayer game.
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.
It's not just jerks. Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them. Then you have lag, solo team pitted against organized teams, ranking systems that arent accurate, etc.
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.
I played League of Legends and didn’t have any problem with the monetization scheme because you could get a great selection of characters to play paying no money (could have played the starter Sona forever) or a modest amount of money.
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)
Pay-to-win mechanics used to always mean a game was not taken seriously competitively. Now with several genres of game it's expected you will pay money to unlock "DLC" characters (e.g. Street Fighter) that you can't otherwise play, but need to play against. It's not exactly pay-to-win since the locked characters are supposed to be fairly balanced, but it's arguable since balance is never perfect and developers seem reluctant to err on the weak side for characters they're trying to sell for a profit.
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...).
there are established good competitive titles without pay2win. look at league, counter-strike for instance.
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.
There are some which are more casual. My partner plays fornite. She's got a group she games with, and half the talking is about the game the other half is basically a catch up session with a game in the background.
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.
Elden Ring has an interesting multiplayer mechanic, and it works quite well.
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.
Multiplayer has also been taken over by free2play skinner box design, so if you want games that aren't designed to waste your time with unfun but addictive gameplay loops and/or nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.
I feel like multiplayer gaming was more fun/popular when there were more jerks, especially on the mics. It seemed like half the fun was the shit talking back in the halo 3/cod 4 era, and it really only stopped when they screwed up how lobbies worked in newer titles where you can't go on all talk between games let alone actually party up, or have proxy chat in game. At least on some PC games you can still get on the mics and PC gamers do actually still use their mics. I'm not sure if the new consoles even ship with mics anymore.
So I think there are two things here. First I agree somewhat though I think that there's a difference between good natured shit talking and being a jerk. I feel like as a kid people still could be mean but tonally it was more jovial, now I feel like I run into more miserable assholes (which I think is much worse). Secondly it still wasn't fun for everyone back in the day, especially if you were different people would try to bully you. I never had an issue but I know a lot of people who have never used public voice chat because they don't want to be harassed.
now you have people getting pissed off by "nice save!" messages used ironically in rocket league, or people getting riled up from a random goal celebration in the popular annual football game.
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.
Shit talking or hearing others shit talk was half the fun. IMO, this should be resolved through the creation of moderated vs unmoderated channels. Different strokes for different folks. Instead, all channels are moderated.
I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant.
Part of this goes back to skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) systems becoming the standard. It used to be I would just play Counter-Strike on a local server because it had the best ping, by far. The same people were playing there all the time, so there was a sense of community, and I could really see myself improve over time in the stats and match results. With SBMM I get punished for playing better by getting matched against harder and harder opponents so that it feels like treading water, even in "unranked" game modes. SBMM is also an abusable system, as dedicated players will often make several accounts to play on and take advantage of their assumed lack of skill as their matchmaking rank is calibrated, throwing the whole thing out of whack.
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.
One factor not talked about enough is that multiplayer games are kind of limited in the "experience" you can create. Single player experiences are unbound. The fact that you can narrate "stories" is what allows gamers to "experience" new things.
Nintendo has the right idea with avoiding any kind of group or voice chat in Splatoon and Mario Kart. Those are always fun online multiplayer experiences for me.
Yeah, almost every multiplayer-focused game nowadays seems to be trying to be the next big e-sport. There's always somebody who's fully focused on the meta and being competitive, and lashing out at people who don't. I have too much work , too much social life and too many hobbies, I'm not going to spend even more time gittin gud for internet strangers.
I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
Maybe I'm just old and washed but it seems like kids these days take multiplayer games way more seriously. Instead of hopping on and playing a few games after school/work people act more like they are trying to make the college sports team. The amount of time and effort required to hold you own has gone up dramatically.
Because they are, at least some of them. E-sports has opportunity for making money in ways that some people are never going to have. There's also the entire ability of streaming and earning by doing that stuff. Game promoters paying out to have IAPs pushed as well.
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.
You know those after-school math tutoring academies that pop up in American strip malls? One of those opened up near me, but instead of grilling your kids in calc or trig to improve their SAT scores, it's an "esports academy" for young hopefuls.
I think there's more going on culturally than just that. Regular sports got more competitive at a younger age, too, and there has always been the possibility of going pro and earning money from it, plus college scholarships.
Not sure how old you are, but I'm around 30, started playing against others back when CS1.5 was launched, and we participated in our LAN party. It was before I had 24/7 internet connection at home, so after and before school was spent practicing with bots, then once a quarter or something we could play against each other, seeing who had "trained" the best since last time.
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?
There was a competitiveness to it, but it was a fun friendly competitiveness. The kind of competitiveness you have when you go bowling with friends, or play poker. You're trying your hardest to win, sure, but also: it's just fun with friends.
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.
The problem is that every modern online game does not allow custom hosted servers. In the good old days of online multiplayer, I would load into a Halo 1 map with 30 other people set to capture the flag (a multiplayer mode that seems to almost not exist anymore!) where the server runs 24/7, and if either side wins, the same players get mixed into two new teams in a "balancing" way, and the game just starts back up. Most people were playing because "I just want to shoot someone" was fun on it's own.
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.
Match making system essentially killed multiplayer games for me. Like yeah, hooray, some random number went up or down. I don't feel like I'm getting any better at the game since there are no notable landmarks(ie. players that are regulars in that server) to measure up against.
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)
I think a lot of players are also tired of games that are only fun with in-app purchases. I avoid any game now that has in-app purchases because it might be a great game where you can buy fancy hats but why would I waste any time trying to find that rare gem amidst all the pay-2-win sewage out there.
I think cosmetics and other in app purchases have a generational divide. I have no clue why people would throw real money on a skin, I just never got that perspective. Meanwhile if you go to some reddit thread on some new game you can see a bunch of gen z users talking about how they feel about the cosmetics, expecting there to be more or better cosmetics, wishing for more cosmetics as paid DLC, as if that is a compelling selling point of the game to have some good cosmetics to look at. It definitely seems like a bit more vain generation compared to the millennials in terms of the clothes and accessories so maybe that checks out with everything else.
Real life is pay2win so I have no idea why I would want more of that as an escape.
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.
> Real life is pay2win so I have no idea why I would want more of that as an escape.
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.
That's the great part about MTX. you can have the 1% more than make up for the 99% that opt out. And apparently the median spending on MTX is $60 as is.
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.
TBF, most mobile games do indeed have chat/dm's. I'm guessing the console games don't do that because it's a logistical nightmare. A sentiment much rarer in Eastern cultures for whatever reason.
I used to like multi-player shooters, when I was young and had infinite time to devote to "git gud." I also played games for the challenge back then. Now that I'm old, I don't have infinite time to upskill, and I mostly play games to relax and unwind after work. I specifically don't want a challenge. Unfortunately, every multi-player first person shooter seems to be geared towards (and infested with) sweaty professional gamers who do nothing but practice, and of course they wipe the floor with me.
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.
Are you only interested in PVP? The PVE shooters can be a lot more chill (Destiny, Division, Borderlands, Remnant, etc.)
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.
Will have to try them. I like shooters, but I prefer to play against push-over AI bots instead of 13 year old pro humans. I guess that's what PVE means.
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Something else I haven't seen mentioned in the comments yet is the rapid pace of AAA title acquisitions by players. I never played as many games as my "gamer" friends, but over the last several years the pace that people pick up and put down games is staggering. Most of my friends will have acquired, played and stopped playing 4-6 games in the time it takes me to get to the oldest one in the current cycle (at which point there are no friends left who are willing to play with.)
Microsoft at least is heading towards a "Netflix for games" streaming model, which gives players very low switching costs between games in the Xbox GamePass market. I pay ~$20 per month and have rental access to a group of AAA games that would cost $1,000's to purchase.
FWIW, the Switch has this and so does the SteamDeck. I'm a father of 3, 5 year old twins and a 3 year old, so it's the killer feature for me on my SteamDeck.
depends on the game, to be honest. Resident's Evil tension would be demolished if you could save in the middle of battle, or right before you turn a corner.
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.
My feeling is that there are basically three reasons for the focus on multiplayer:
* 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.
I think the real reason for focus on multiplayer is that it keeps the game fresh without things that are really half-baked like procedural world gen. That drives engagement- keeping people playing- which gives companies more opportunities to sell microtransactions, skins, etc.
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I don’t feel comfortable doing that unless the chance of an interruption is extremely close to zero. Stresses me out.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...).
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.
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.
Can you share an example of this outside of mobile games?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)
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.
We still get our fair share of season passes and day one DLCs, so it's not total immunity.
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.
EDIT: typo meant non-competitive co-op
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've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
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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.
(And Heaton is a dick, just saying.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill-based_matchmaking
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.
I publish a weekly gaming newsletter called The Gaming Pub (https://www.thegamingpub.com/) similar to the Hacker Newsletter. I curated an assortment of links with the most important news and other topics from the gaming world (I'll include this link in tomorrow's issue).
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.
https://www.thegamingpub.com/
Thanks!
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.
* 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.