Gearbox Boss Bemoans Superfluous Multiplayer Modes 136
Speaking with Edge magazine, Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford lamented the tendency of game publishers to force multiplayer modes into games that don't need them. Quoting:
"Pitchford points to the likes of Dead Space 2 as evidence that decisions are often motivated by the desire to tick boxes on a feature list, rather than for the good of the game itself. 'Let’s forget about what the actual promise of a game is and whether it’s suited to a narrative or competitive experience,' he tells us. 'Take that off the table for a minute and just think about the concept-free feature list: campaign, co-op, how many players? How many guns? How long is the campaign? 'When you boil it down to that, you take the ability to make good decisions out of the picture. And the reason they do it is because they notice that the biggest blockbusters offer a little bit for every kind of consumer. You have people that want co-op and competitive, and players who want to immerse themselves in deep fiction. But the concept has to speak to that automatically; it can’t be forced. That’s the problem.'"
Couldn't agree more (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh god yes, I couldn't agree more. The real problem I have with multiplayer modes forced into games that don't need them is that they often end up forcing the game design down particular pathways, which don't always improve the experience.
Take weapon balance, for example. Multiplayer gamers these days being too lazy to actually find and pick up weapons like we had do back in the days of Doom and Quake (yes, yes, get off my lawn etc), the trend is for game designers to try to make sure that all of the weapons in first and third person shooters are "balanced". And yet for me, part of the appeal of a decent first person shooter is upgrading my arsenal as I go along; picking up better weapons and managing the limited ammo available for them. Remember the first time you found a BFG in Doom? You don't get feelings like that too often any more, as there's an absolute terror of allowing one weapon to be "better" than any of the others. I suspect that similar considerations force the adoption of my least favorite trope of modern action gaming ever - the 2 weapons limit. This absolutely ruined the campaign in Resistance 2 (sequel to what I still maintain is the best console fps ever) by making it far riskier to actually experiment with all the weird and wacky weapons that are Insomniac's speciality - if you can only carry two weapons at a time, you're going to stick with the rifle+shotgun combo 95% of the time and trust the game to put a sniper rifle in your path if you come up on one of the obligatory sniping sections.
Then there's the ridiculously short campaigns that are often justified on the basis of multiplayer. Look at something like Homefront; a game which is ostensibly all about its plot and setting has a ludicrous campaign that I beat in less than 4 and a half hours, which doesn't do anything to actually delve into the world they've created. And the excuse - there's multiplayer. It's noticable that Bulletstorm, which de-emphasises multiplayer as far as a modern marketing department will allow, bucks this trend and actually has a pretty decent campaign length (I brought my first playthrough home in a little under 11 hours).
I know there are people out there who really dig multiplayer in these things. But there are a lot of us who don't; after being very, very heavily into the Counter-Strike scene 8-10 years ago, I have had enough experience of being sworn at in German by 14 year olds for this lifetime. Multiplayer these days is limited to occasional co-op with real-life friends - and that doesn't require absolutely every game to have a tagged on multiplayer modes. Besides - pick a random "yesterday's big thing" shooter - 6 months old or greater - that wasn't a massive multiplayer phenomenon like a CoD or Halo and then try to find a server with more than 2 people on it. I did this with a few games on my steam list and in most cases, it just wasn't happening.
I blame Call of Duty (Score:1)
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I have had enough experience of being sworn at in German by 14 year olds for this lifetime.
You mad, bro?
If you don't like a server just pick another. I live in HK and hates all the HK, Taiwan, Mainland TF2 servers because there's no talking. It feels like you're playing bots all the time. So I switched over to a great LA server despite 180ms ping, enjoying every minute of it. If kiddies gets you mad just switch. Kiddies can't deal with lag and will not bother you in the new one.
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Kiddies can't deal with lag and will not bother you in the new one.
Unless they kick you for high ping.
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That reminds me of two things I've heard in the past week about my Dallas, TX TF2 servers:
Last Friday on my Event TF2 server, red.ocrtf2.com:27015, one person said they liked the server "because people talked." This was during my Medieval Madness event Medieval Mode was on for all maps in addition to alltalk, nocrits, nodmgspread, and fixedweaponspread. This server is also available for when our normal server is full, but crits are enabled by default.
I saw someone yesterday playing on my normal TF2 server
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Yeppers, for us veterans TF2, CS whatnot is really secondary. It's the funny convo, smart ass remarks that's addictive. These fps's you know, once you mastered one, they're all the same, relax headshots lols.
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Agreed, for the most part.
R2 pissed me off more because of the removal of the ability to play through the game in split-screen.
R1 had been great fun to play through with a friend and few beers. The two gun thing, to me, was them trying to be Gears of War.
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The good news is that it seems Insomniac have heard this loud and clear. The third game is bringing back the weapon-wheel and, I believe, split-screen modes (though would need to check the latter).
I think you're right about Gears of War. They probably compared R1's sales to GoW's and felt envious, forgetting that GoW was released for a mature platform which already had a large installed base, while R1 was a launch title for a system that proved a bit of a slow-starter.
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Unfortunately life has moved on since then, and I now live a couple of continents away from my gaming buddy, rather than in the same house.
Timezones are as much an impediment to online gaming as distance, too.
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The 2-weapon limit is utterly moronic and problematic for any game that doesn't try to be "realistic". And that's about 90% of the FPSes that should NOT have the weapon limit. I just finished Bulletstorm (had a bucketload of fun, first time in years with an FPS), and even with the myriad ways to switch weapons after pretty much each encounter, I still felt like if they'd given you all the weapons all the time it could have been even more fun.
"Kill with skill" is good, but killing with skill by drilling a gu
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Bulletstorm does at least allow you three weapons (albeit with one of them always locked to the assault rifle - which is at least useful). But yes, it would have been even better if you could have done longer multi-weapon chains.
I wonder if there's a consolisation issue here. A keyboard has lots of buttons for quick weapon selection - a console controller doesn't, so designers tend to retreat to a single "switch weapons" button. The original Resistance and the likes of Ratchet & Clank have shown that we
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I demand multiplayer. I also demand a good singleplayer experience. Any FPS which cannot deliver both does not need to be purchased. I am remarkably unlikely to buy any FPS which does not have co-op, which to me is the best thing in FPS.
I don't see why gamers don't expect a game to not suck any more. Just another lame game that doesn't build on the past? Throw it back!
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Couch co-op is important to me. Multiplayer is not -- for the simple fact that there are only so many players out there and pick-up lobbies get emptier the more game titles they are spread over.
I'd prefer if the game companies left multiplayer for a limited number of games specifically designed/playtested for it. Speaking of which, why no 3D first-person Joust? You'd think...
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Speaking of which, why no 3D first-person Joust? You'd think...
That actually sounds like something you could pull off relatively easily as a mod for some other game... I bet somebody crafty could do it in Garry's Mod.
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Could be good for a proof of concept. Everquest had a little fun with it but from a 3rd person perspective. IMO it needs to be first person with the combined feel of a fast multiplayer FPS and a dogfight flight simulator. Some folks with more art talent than coding skill drew up some models a decade or so ago, and IIRC there were unvetted screenshots of a supposedly scrubbed attempt by a game company.
Probably it would require more than just modding an FPS to really bring it to life -- there'd need to be
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Speaking of which, why no 3D first-person Joust? You'd think...
You never played Mount and Blade?
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Lacks birds. And floating rock formations. And lava trolls.
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I largely agree with your post, but, one correction: the BFG was actually balanced. Sure, it was powerful as shit, but it was also super slow, comparatively.
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You have some valid points, however I would like to add another 2 perspectives as a game programmer and game designer.
- Single Player vs Multi-Player. You must consider the audience. For a single player game, a linear increase in power works great! In multiplayer not so great .. which dovetails into my next point:
- "Proper" Weapon Balance has become a Rock-Paper-Scissor approach.. Otherwise what happens is that you [literally] get a death-spiral for who can find, for the sake of argument lets say the We
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I p
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er... sorry, the last line should have said "move faster but be restricted to melee only during the duration, which is 10 seconds. It also makes you deal and receive mini-crits (TF2 has two levels of critical hits)."
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Not sure I agree with that. Short and easy are different concepts. Plenty of modern games - including console games - which typify everything I said above are actually quite difficult. Halo Reach was one particular example - I found it a good bit harder than many other fpses, including a lot of old ones. But it's hard for all the wrong reasons - it has a serious hard on for inflicting cheap deaths and 1-hit-kills on the player, combined with a moronically broken checkpoint system.
In fact, old games are ofte
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Your last sentence describes precisely what I love about Demon's Souls -- it's a genuinely difficult RPG (albeit an action-RPG, but still). It's *hard*, but it's not grindy unless you are trying to unlock goodies that require specific world alignments, in which case you need a bit of grinding to get what you need to change the zone alignment to what you need. Even that is different than old school JRPG grinding -- you aren't grinding to be powerful enough to complete content, you're grinding to treasure h
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That's not rubber banding. Rubber banding would be compensating for poor AI by 'seeing' you through walls (which they no doubt do). Making them stronger isnt cheating to simulate difficulty.
In racing games rubber banding is the enemies managing to catch up to you when you leave them in the dust, not them just being faster to start with.
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In online FPS, what you might call rubber banding is the effect felt when you're scrambling around a corner only to be shot by someone with a 150 ping and the server drags you back due to their latency. It's a phenomenon I first saw in Counter-Strike after a major netcode update and I quickly dubbed it "bungie bullets". I encountered situations where I saw myself run into cover half a dozen times, only to be dragged back out into the line of fire and be shot by the same lagging player again.
Now I don't want
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I hear that. In MW2, due to the benefit of killcams, it was apparent that I often got killed by people who started firing as much as 1/4 second AFTER I should have been landing hits. Pretty frustrating when it's a guy who just goes around knifing everyone--you unload half a mag into his face from 15' feet away, and *shank*. Of course, the game browser is more than happy to connect you with folks from Europe or South America. At least a legitimate server setup could weed out high ping players.
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Bad AI is, I think, a deliberate feature of many modern fpses, particularly those in the Call of Duty mold. What these games are selling is a "cinematic experience" which involves allowing the player to mow down vast numbers of enemies with relative ease. It's unrealistic as hell - and it hardly contributes to the whole po-faced "serious and thoughtful treatment of war" that the likes of Medal of Honor pretend to be - but it's integral to the game and, going off sales figures, it seems to be what a lot of c
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You could always go the opposite route. Instead of cranking up the enemy hit points and keeping them dumb compared to the player, you could make opponents with very good AI but who brittle as a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen while the player has superhuman endurance.
It's much harder because AI is hard, but I think that, too, would be cinematic.
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If they die the instant the player sees them, there's not much point in making them smart.
There's still a point, if it means they can sneak up on the player and shoot him in the back before he sees them.
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The goal of AI in games is to be entertaining though.
Being smart is useful up to a point, because players like to see the game respond to them, it makes the experience feel more dynamic and engages the player to respond in kind.
However, the value of effective of AI drops off very quickly. Players like to get challenged, but not beaten. Ultimately players like to win more than they lose. There's much less play in this area for shooters than in other more contrived games where the designers have full control
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Rubberbanding AI is a term for racing games. The farther in front you get from the AI racers, the faster they become to catch up. The farther behind you get from the AI racers, the slower they become so you can catch up.
Essentially, it's as though there's a rubber band tying the player car to all other AI cars.
The idea is that having cars around you and jostling for a pass is supposedly more exciting for the player. However, most players see through this pretty easily.
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Yep, pretty much, or you could sumarise that by saying games are just too piss easy these days. I blame console gamer scum.
in one sense spyder-implee is right.
we have multiplayer games in PC that are BLATANT ports from console which implement P2P multiplayer.
this severely limits the multiplayer modes to 18 players.
as we all know a standalone dedicated server for PC games can handle MORE players
so this trend to have small maps and a small amount of players is tragic
in summation games for PC are being made but made with the limitations of consoles in mind...
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I see this a lot, and you've been modded troll already, but I will ask you this: why blame the gamers? It isn't as though there have been all these deep and amazing console games that the market snubbed in favor of watered-down garbage; they play the best games they're offered. The closest they have gotten to a real FPS (e.g., Halo) has been embraced (perhaps over-)enthusiastically. Seems to be that your ire is misplaced; if console games are to blame then the responsibility lies with developers and publ
Dark Space 2 is a bad example (Score:2)
Not just games. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just games. Everything is ruined by bullet-points; from software to politics to porn. I don't know how we can solve this problem as a society. People want quick summaries, sound bytes, standardized tests, but they never tell the whole story. It's easier to produce to the bullet points, just like it's easier to teach students to the test.
ideas.ppt (Score:3, Funny)
* Teach critical thinking, starting at a young age.
* Actively promote deep and creative behaviors.
* Promote your ideas through subtle irony.
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If you don't like bullet-points in porn you're clearly not watching the right stuff.
Dunno if it's just bullet points (Score:2)
Dunno if it's just the summaries a bullet points, as just the idea that the more stuff there is in, the better. That if a game/car/phone/product has X and Y, it's obviously worse than one which has X, Y and Z. Something with just two bullet points is worse than something with three bullet points, and both are worse than something with four bullet points. You're getting less for your money, right?
Basically the difference I'm getting at is that people often don't even as much care what those bullet points are
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If by porn bullet points, you mean boob jobs that jut out like Madonna's bra, then I agree. Otherwise, I don't follow you.
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Everything is ruined by bullet-points; from software to politics to porn.
I don't know, for some people, porn is improved by bullet-points [urbandictionary.com] !
Could you get us more co-op multiplayer? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Co-op? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, so far I haven't seen a SINGLE game in years that offers the ability for you to play through the story mode with a friend/spouse/etc.
A quick look at my library of games in steam reveals the following games that allow co-op through the story line.
Alien Swarm (admittedly only one fairly short campaign by default, but there are community made maps).
Borderlands.
Left 4 Dead.
Left 4 Dead 2.
Magicka.
Serious Sam HD First and second encounter (Technically re-releases of games from 2000)
Sol Survivor.
I'm sure there are others out there.
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Call of Duty World at War.
And then there's other games which offer non-campaign co-op modes like Splinter Cell: Conviction, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 etc.
Re:Co-op? (Score:4, Insightful)
Call of Duty World at War.
Rainbow Six Vegas
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
Resident Evil 5
And then there's other games which offer non-campaign co-op modes like Splinter Cell: Conviction, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 etc.
There's surprisingly numerous co-op games out there if one bothers to look.
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Saints Row 2
Many LOLs were had.
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DeathSpank
Shank
Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light
Trine
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That's odd I distinctly remember a story line in Borderlands and Magicka.
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Re:Co-op? (Score:5, Informative)
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Halo 3 and Halo 3 ODST
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There are lots of things Perfect Dark did right that I miss in modern games, like interesting weapons and a main female character who didn't dress like a whore.
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There are lots of things Perfect Dark did right that I miss in modern games, like interesting weapons and a main female character who didn't dress like a whore.
Since when does Samus Aran of Metroid series dress like a prostitute outside rule 34?
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Disclaimer: all of the following linked pictures showcase absolutely no nudity; however, you probably wouldn't want to have someone looking over your shoulder when you open them regardless.
Since the Zero Suit [smashbros.com]. Compare to this [atlantabondage.com]. (As an aside, it is damn hard to find a SFW picture of a woman in a catsuit... probably more about my search parameters than anything.
Hell, even in the NES era - the first friggin' game! - they had her running around in a one piece [metroid-database.com].
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There's plenty of Coop in the FPS genre I find, just look at Halo, Gears of War, Army of Two, Splinter Cell etc, Call of Duty also has coop although there the coop missions are seperate.
There's some coop in the RPG genre, but I find it all lackluster, especially Fable.
Generally it feels like I have to wait atleast 6 months between a game with decent coop to come out (Usually a sequel to Halo/Gears/Army)
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Do you actually get to play the single-player campaing co-operatively with another player? If not then I atleast don't count those as co-op.
Gears of War and Left4Dead were built with Co-Op campaign first and foremost in mind. It really shows and they're great fun to play.
Halo isn't DESIGNED around being a co-op game, but it's co-op campaign is still pretty fun.
Army of Two I really didn't like, and Call of Duty doesn't have a co-op campaign.
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Army of Two effectively does not have a single player campaign, as the mechanics and design of the game emphasize co-operative play with another male human, with whom you have a healthy, intimate relationship (ie. the aggro/baiting/diversion combat, stage design with split routes, and the blatantly homosexual themes). It plays very well, as both planning and synchronous effort are mandatory to survive most scenes. Having also played Gears of War, which had a much worse mission design, I would specifically r
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Diablo 2 had some good co-op (and it definatly was co-op in that you could have multiple players in your party all wandering around the world with you and fighting the same bad guys as in the SP campaign, only harder)
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How many games these days really do offer co-op gaming? I mean, so far I haven't seen a SINGLE game in years that offers the ability for you to play through the story mode with a friend/spouse/etc. No, they're all just rehashes of CTF or deathmatch, and those are stuffed in every single god damn game, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. But why, oh, why no co-op, ever?
Some of us aren't interested in competitive gaming against random *sshats, instead some of us wish to be able to share the story campaing with a close person. There's plenty of games that actually would offer huge amounts of fun if there was co-op included. A great, deep and insightful story is all the more worth it if you can share the tale with someone, but you don't always even need that; I remember back in the days when Unreal 1 was still new. The story was nothing too fancy or epic, it was mostly just a straight-forward FPS game. But when you set the difficulty level up a notch and joined in a co-op game it felt like a totally new experience compared to single-player. I think we eventually played it through something like 5 or 6 times, simply because it was fun every time.
Or am I just the odd one in the bunch again for wishing for good ol' co-op mode in games?
Um, Halo?
I mean, pretty much every single thing you're pining for is in every Halo game. Shit I can't even count the number of hours I've spent playing co-op through all five of them. On a bang/buck point alone those games have been the single best entertainment purchases I have ever made.
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How many games these days really do offer co-op gaming? I mean, so far I haven't seen a SINGLE game in years that offers the ability for you to play through the story mode with a friend/spouse/etc.
Then quite honestly, you haven't played many games in the last several years.
There are several very popular games designed from the ground up for co-op: Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 5, etc. In these games, even in single-player, you have AI team-mates. You literally can't play them solo.
I have no idea what you've been playing if you think no modern games have co-op. Co-op was pretty dead in the early 2000s, but it's been back more than ever for the last five or so years.
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How many games these days really do offer co-op gaming? I mean, so far I haven't seen a SINGLE game in years that offers the ability for you to play through the story mode with a friend/spouse/etc. No, they're all just rehashes of CTF or deathmatch, and those are stuffed in every single god damn game, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. But why, oh, why no co-op, ever?
Umm, Halo series, Gears of War, OFP Dragon Rising and upcoming Red River, Armored Core For Answer, Borderland, Saints Row 2 all say hello. You can play full story mode co-op in all those, and that just on 360 and just off the top of my head.
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Interestingly enough, Randy Pitchford's super successful game Borderlands was probably partly successful due to its multiplayer co-op, which was tons of fun.
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so far I haven't seen a SINGLE game in years that offers the ability for you to play through the story mode with a friend/spouse/etc.
Gears of War series. This is how CoOp should be done.
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Halo, for one, on all games. Some of my friends went through story mode on harder settings because of it.
Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach
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There's a big budget game right around the corner that, while it doesn't have you go through the single-player campaign in co-op, it
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Monster Hunter
Doesn't have a story really, but basically all content can be played with up to 4 players. My experience is with the PSP versions, which are very fun with three friends in the same room doing ad-hoc wireless multiplayer.
Lost Planet 2
Didn't play the first one so I can't comment on it. Second one had full campaign coop by again up to 4 players at a time. Boss fights reminded me somewhat of Monster Hunter with guns, otherwise more a gears-of-war s
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It's come full circle (Score:3)
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Back in the VGA gaming days, games were all single-player.
The original Doom game had multiplayer support over a LAN - coop. Was a bit unstable though...
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This is not only a problem in games. (Score:2)
The entire software industry suffers from box-checking syndrome.
Thanks, my list is now complete! (Score:2)
Restate summary and apply its concerns more broadly to either maximize impact or water down the concern.... CHECK!
(Note to self: Fix comment.load() AJAX protocol in Slashdot bingo browser plugin -- slash.parse.js:227 )
How about a multiplayer "Thief 4"? (Score:3)
Waiting for Thi4f...
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Isn't Assassins Creed: Brotherhood's multiplayer kind of like this?
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Dontcha mean "Thi4f"?
Now there is Thievery, a Unreal Tournament (the original) mod that does a guards vs thieves thing. There's also the modification to Thief 2 to make that co-op. It's not a bad idea but it does seem like one that could be easily, easily, implemented poorly and, ultimately, waste time and effort that could have been used to flesh out and polish up other areas of the game. Add in the disappoints of Thief 3 (small levels, no rope arrows, no water, "body awareness", third person perspectiv
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I believe Splinter Cell had a multiplayer mode where one player was the infiltrator and everyone else played guards trying to catch him.. that would be perfectly fitting for Thief 4.
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Oh, nvm. You did spell Thi4f.
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Maybe I'm just old... (Score:2)
All I can think when I play those kinds of games is that the game was cobbled together from a broken set of priorities. It ruins the experience for me, I expect the single player be training for multiplayer. I would never dream of playing the multiplayer first, even in a game series I was intimat
Missing the reason, I think (Score:3)
Purely conjecture, but I believe it's less to do with "checking off a feature" and more to do with the following:
- Save time & money on content generation, since people who play multiplayer will use the same map over and over.
- Form of DRM / Piracy Protection, if there is 'server validation' then there's an indirect 'purchase validation'
Personally, I don't buy a game for multiplayer unless it's split screen, and those are few and far between. I'd play an older game like Goldeneye 64 with 3 buds long before playing any shooter over xbox live.
I only play multiplayer (Score:2)
And I find there aren't that many multiplayer only games... especially games designed specifically only for multiplayer; they tend to be mods & community driven
What the heck are you guys talking about? (Score:3)
Nearly every game for the Xbox 360 is single-player (or online frag fest).
Damn, where the hell are the Baldur's Gates, the Dungeon Heroes, the multi-player co-op dungeon crawlers. The platform has been out for years and there's practically nada for it.
Seriously, I am sick of single-player + fragfest. Why? Well, I'm married. I've got kids. I can't find the time to play through a super long campaign. And I sure as heck can't find the time to hone my death match skills. So not much fun there to be had.
I want a game I can play the campaign through in a a day or two of being sick. Better yet, I want a game with a good co-op campaign that my wife and I can play and that doesn't immediately become super-repetitive and boring.
When I look at the shelves....90% of the games on the shelf are single-player + online deathmatch or online co-op. Of the few remaining games with co-op, it's basically sports, racing, or crap.
I WANT BALDUR'S GATE III
I thought we were past this (Score:2)
There was a period, in the late nineties and most of the 2000s that every game had to have multiplayer to be cool. You would be hard-pressed to find a game from that era that didn't have a multiplayer mode, even if it was just tacked on, buggy as hell and unbalanced. Even Myst [wikipedia.org] had a multiplayer spin-off! That was a time when we started seeing multiplayer-only games, like Quake III and Unreal Tournament.
These days I think it has become acceptable to release games without multiplayer. Games have become more c