Single-Player Game Model 'Finished,' Says EA Exec 439
Frank Gibeau, label president for EA Games, recently spoke with Develop about the publisher's long term development strategy. Gibeau thinks developing major games without multiplayer modes is a passing fad:
"...it’s not only about multiplayer, it’s about being connected. I firmly believe that the way the products we have are going, they need to be connected online. ... I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished. Online is where the innovation and the action [are] at."
Well, I think... (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is that EA would rather pump out the same big name game over and over. Guaranteed profits, no risk, and virtually no money spent on developing the hard things like a good plot or character depth. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite games are multiplayer (hell, the Battlefield series is one of my favorite series as well, been a fan since BF1942, and don't get me started on Valve games), but by no means is single player a dead genre.
Disgusting to hear for a gamer (Score:5, Interesting)
They clearly understand jack about a gamer's heart and what makes a game great, but they hope to get their business-goals accepted by trying to sound all visionary-like.
Alas, nobody with experience in gaming will be able to take them seriously.
EA's true goals:
These profit-driven bastard won't spend a second thinking about what makes a game great, because they don't know jack about games. I spit in their face.
The future lies with indie-games and Nintendo
The Title is misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
So when I boot up NFS and get ready to tick off another event on that big map I instead skip over to the Autolog and see what my friends have been up to lately. I then spend the next hour and a half trying to beat their times and reclaim my top spot on the wall. So for a game where I would normally run straight through trying merely to complete every event and reach 100% completion, I'm now basically wasting time re-racing events competitively against my friends list. And you know what? I'm loving it. I think this is actually the best way to enhance replayability that I've seen in a long time. And it's not like leaderboards are anything new in games, far from it. But that connectedness is really addicting. I've yet to play one multi-player event. I will at some point but I'm still having fun with the single-player. Fun that indeed benefits from the connected, social features they've weaved into the game.
And yea I'm not a Facebook guy but from what I understand this is a pretty common thread among Facebook games as well. It's an interesting way to game.
Re:Pub, social, dollars (Score:2, Interesting)
If I want to socialize I'll go to the pub or the park. I suspect Mr Exec is more interested in the endless monthly fees they can gouge from players.
Somehow I think you're spending far more money in the pub than on monthly fees, but you don't seem to be complaining about that.
Me on the other hand, I'd much rather spend the money on games than boozing.
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
If a game is designed to be played single player, then it shouldn't have multiplayer tacked on; I agree with you there. (PopCap casual games are a perfect example of that. They make all their money selling simple, single-player games and are very profitable.) But if the game is ever going to have a multiplayer aspect to it, the developers need to first balance the multiplayer aspect and build the single player after multiplayer is finished. Not only does this ensure that multiplayer modes are enjoyable (because it's evenly balanced) but also provides a way to drop a beta test without giving away the single player aspect. (One of the more well-known developers that seems to work this way is Blizzard. Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 betas were multiplayer only, campaigns came out with full-game and were still an enjoyable single-player experience. Even after campaign is played through, multiplayer is still fun.)
The problem is that so many games are designed and developed in single-player and then a multiplayer addition is hacked on at the end. This often results in strange bugs for multiplayer and countless exploits, not to mention character/weapon/whatever imbalance and overall just shitty experience in the game online as a whole.
Re:Bollocks (Score:4, Interesting)
Co-op FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
Red Dead Redemption had that problem- no ranking at all. You go in at level 1 riding a nag and armed with some dinky weapon loadout, and a level 50 guy with a golden gun riding a golden buffalo that runs at about Mach 3 keeps killing you. Whee. Always wondered what the fun was from the level 50 guy's POV. It seems it would be like playing a game with a God code activated. It would get boring after 5 minutes.
And you have to be a fanatic to even get to level 50. I got to level 36 and was burned out on it completely. I think the golden buffalo is for reaching 50, passing into legend, and going from 1 to 50 *again*! Crap, I'm just not that OCD.
Co-op is the real king in my book, especially games like Borderlands where you can play the same thing single or in co-op, and the game adjusts the difficulty based on how many people are in the group. I played that both ways, and it was great.
Portal 2 looks like the next great co-op. In that case it looks like added levels designed specifically for two players.
Re:The problem with multiplayer is... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with multiplayer is it's inherently a lifeless, impersonal experience.
Try playing Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, 10, 12... and Final Fantasy 11.
In all of those games you have a deep storyline to weave your way through, you get to associate with the characters, you have a series of quests that fit into the bigger picture, you have an antagonist to chase down, goals that fall only to reveal bigger goals in an expanding scope...
Except Final Fantasy 11.
In Final Fantasy 11, you might get miniature stories, maybe, just to make the quests interesting. You get quests that fall into the bigger picture of leveling up and finding rare items. You have goals that fall down only to reveal other unrelated goals of similar size, but occasionally of bigger numbers (i.e. the monsters have more HP and ATK so you have to be level 20 instead of level 15).
If they implement something with a massive storyline, coherent, attention-grabbing, emotional, fulfilling, then it's just another single-player game except your party members are 4 other players and the stats are unbalanced because you entered with a character at level 30. Oh, and also, you're paying monthly for the privilege of playing, without so much replay value, and without the privilege of playing privately when your friends aren't around, without the privilege of playing for free, without the privilege of spending 300 hours just exploring unless you want to pay for the 300 hours you're online (or the span of months that 300 hours is spent in).
Online play today appeals to exactly the part of the brain that lets the TSA get away with what they're doing. It's not that online play is bad-- oh, this is a nice feature, and was a good genre in the day of Ultima Online, Battle.net, and EVO-- it's that people who work at GameStop or own XBoxes are now telling me that single player gaming is dead AND BELIEVE IT. They think online play is now the only way to make a game worth buying. They have been successfully sheepified, and the companies that moved from $50 complete games to 30% of the $50 game for $50 and the rest for $100 more (expensive shareware-- DLC == shareware) are now moving to "just pay us to keep playing" models.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)