Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

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macdude22
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Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by macdude22 »

Really good commentary about the slow death of single player gameplay over at destructoid. This article really hit a chord with me. I can remember slaving away as a kid in the family resturant and then coming home late and sinking into a game of Realmz or Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or whatever. Ahhh memorys. I can only hope my child will have such a fondness for great games.


http://www.destructoid.com/being-a-solo ... 2138.phtml
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by BasiliskWrangler »

Great article!

I was a beta tester on the first Ultima Online (I'd say it was circa 1996) which of course was one of the first real MMOs to hit the market. Even then, back when the technology was new, I found it unpleasant. I grew up on single player RPGs for years, and suddenly with UO I had to share the world with 5000 other "heroes". I remember finding a cave in the woods and was very excited to explore it, but when I entered there were 30 people running around killing the spawning creatures and gathering loot. So much for "discovering this remote, unexplored cave". Luckily they've improved upon this sort of thing with modern MMOs, but I never overcame my dislike for MMOs in general.

I'd rather play a 20-year-old SP RPG than a modern MMO any day.
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macdude22
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by macdude22 »

BasiliskWrangler wrote: Luckily they've improved upon this sort of thing with modern MMOs, but I never overcame my dislike for MMOs in general.
To an extent but most MMOs, even WoW succumb to this issue. In an MMO, everyone can't be the hero. In a single player game, you are the hero.

I tend to think that Neverwinter Nights online play is the way to do it, in that case you are a "band of heroes" and the gameplay still works.

"Give me single player or give me death." - Patrick Henry
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Getharn »

It is an interesting article, and it's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one who still values a great single-player experience above anything multiplayer can offer. Of course, the fact that there are all these people on the Eschalon forums has already gone to show that anyway.

Playing games online is all fine if you're a teenager with a ton of free time, but if you can only find the odd spare half-hour at random times of day, how the heck is the online experience going to cope with you? The answer, of course, is that it isn't.
macdude22 wrote:I tend to think that Neverwinter Nights online play is the way to do it, in that case you are a "band of heroes" and the gameplay still works.
Exactly. I haven't done a lot of online play, but of the stuff I've sampled I've yet to find something that comes within a few orders of magnitude of the fun of NWN. I used to play on a persistent world, but it had a user base so small that you'd continually run into the same people. There were only about ten people logged in at any one time, and if you formed a party of at least 4, you'd pretty much guarantee a dedicated DM. Name me the online service that can match those sorts of odds.

Unfortunately I uninstalled NWN awhile ago, during a server upgrade, but I'm sorely tempted to put it back on to see if there are any PW's still going. NWN was the game that stayed on my hard disk for the longest by far, and online play was the single reason.

Recently someone bought me a copy of D&D online, so I'll be installing that soon to give it a fair chance. Who knows, maybe it'll match up to the NWN experience - I'd be very surprised, however.

As an aside, I heard that WoC were setting up some sort of online service which allowed people to effectively run PnP games online - so they offer a live map service and chat room, and also presumably hold your character sheets and whatever else, but other than that it's all just a way for people to game online instead of in a living room. Has anybody else heard of this, or am I imagining it?
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Higher Game »

I've never played it, but supposedly a lot of World of Warcraft is based on single player content, because Blizzard found out that a significant amount of players did stuff alone or with just 1-2 friends. I think that's good, but having to pay every month really pushes me away from MMOs.
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by waltshooter »

Getharn wrote:As an aside, I heard that WoC were setting up some sort of online service which allowed people to effectively run PnP games online - so they offer a live map service and chat room, and also presumably hold your character sheets and whatever else, but other than that it's all just a way for people to game online instead of in a living room. Has anybody else heard of this, or am I imagining it?
I think you're talking about their "Game Table".

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dn ... /gametable
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Rush »

I realize this is a reply to an old post, but I just finished the article, and I am glad to have been given the opportunity. Thanks for providing the link, Macdude22.

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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Ulfgeir »

That's a good article, and it reminds me of why I'm here in the first place. I've been growing restless with the majority of gaming options available these days. It seems like everything is either multiplayer-only, or at the very least multiplayer-enabled. And while one can make the argument that it's possible to just ignore the multiplayer aspects of a game, it's also possible to argue that games are being indelibly altered by the sheer, overwhelming popularity of the multiplayer experience.

A good point in question is the newly released 'Sacred 2: Fallen Angel.' I really looked forward to the release of this game. I played the original when it came out, which was an old school, isometric hack-n-slash. And this new title in the series was supposed to be more of the same, only with fancier 3D graphics. Imagine my surprise when I purchased the game and found out that it was impossible to pause it. I'm not kidding. Even if you ignore the multiplayer options entirely and choose to play the game in single player mode, it's still not possible to pause, just like an MMO. The developers commented on their forums that it was more cost effective to build the game that way. So that effectively, the game engine has no idea whether you're playing by yourself or with a group of others, it runs the same either way. No pause. Need to use the bathroom real quick? You have to teleport back to the nearest town, make sure no enemies are near, and then just leave your character standing there and hope nothing happens while you're gone. Even bringing up the options menu doesn't freeze the game world.

I just flat-out stopped playing after a few attempts. It was too nerve-wracking to play knowing that my character might be doomed to die each time the phone rang, a delivery man knocked at the door, or a family member needed my attention. I worry that things of this nature might become more common as the multiplayer experience becomes more and more highly regarded over the single player.
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Getharn »

In a sense, the larger producers going to multiplayer has some beneficial side effects, in that it makes room in the market for smaller studios to fill the single-player RPG space. This makes sense, because running a load of multiplayer servers requires a large up-front investment, as well as continual running costs, and that's probably only feasible for fairly large, established studios. Writing a good single-player game of course requires investment, but it's mostly up-front and somewhat lower. It's also (debatably) easier to compromise on certain areas to reduce the cost and still produce a good game, whereas running multiplayer servers can't really be cost-reduced beyond a certain point.

Also, Bioware is still a major studio fighting the good fight - I'm definitely looking forward to playing Dragon Age, as I'm hoping it'll be a return to the form of Baldur's Gate and the like. Whether it's plot will be as compelling as they'd have us believe remains to be seen, but I'm prepared to give Bioware a fair chunk of benefit of the doubt.

Depending on relative release dates, I guess it's possible I might be playing DA on the PC and EBII on the Mac side-by-side! ;-)
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Ulfgeir »

I've also been a big fan of Bioware's catalog down through the years. And you're right, they are one of the last big studios that remain dedicated to producing quality single-player titles. They keep referring to Dragon Age as the 'spiritual successor' to the Baldur's Gate franchise, and I sincerely hope that's more than just a bunch of marketing hype, because I'd far rather see them steer back in that direction than continue on the path that Neverwinter Nights has been going.
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Getharn »

Ulfgeir wrote:I'd far rather see them steer back in that direction than continue on the path that Neverwinter Nights has been going.
NWN was, at least, multiplayer as opposed to massively multiplayer. Multiplayer experiences were still quite personal, on a good persistent world server or in a private group, and it became a tool that a DM could use to run a game with distant players. The fact that it was such a powerful tool for people to create good small-scale multiplayer experiences put it in a different league to the likes of WoW and D&D online, in my opinion.

It also offered the ability to craft excellent single-player adventures, even if the official campaign was a little, uh, lacklustre. I think it did a good job of balancing the two.

Admittedly, I found NWN2 a bit of a letdown, even though the official campaign was, in my opinion, an awful lot better. I think it just became too difficult to design content for it, so the homebrew market, which kept NWN going for a very long time (and indeed it's probably still going), didn't have a lot of incentive to upgrade.

Still, I agree that with the amount of effort that's gone into DA, and only into a single-player experience, we should hopefully have something to look forward to.
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Re: Being a solo gamer in a multiplayer world

Post by Ulfgeir »

I fully agree, NWN was a marvelous piece of technology for what it was, namely a rough approximation of the table top experience transposed onto the Internet. But personally, I didn't enjoy playing the game overly much. I purchased it in order to take advantage of the single player content, and as you pointed out in your post, the overall caliber of that content was rather lacklustre.

I also picked up NWN 2, hoping for a better experience, and indeed the single player campaign was a more enjoyable affair than the first. Some of the companion interactions in particular were quite well done. Unfortunately, when the title was first released, and for quite a period of time thereafter, there were a disturbingly high number of bugs being reported by users. Of course, this can in part be chalked up to Bioware relegating NWN 2 to a different game studio. A company called Obsidion actually made the game.

The same was done with the sequal to Knights of The Old Republic, and with similar results.

But no matter how good the single player content is in a game that's been produced with multiplayer functionality, I can't help but wonder how much better it could have been if the full resources behind the project had been focused on the individual experience.
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