What with Battleborn and Overwatch coming out this month I’d thought I’d ask.
Personally, I don’t like it. If I’m gonna spend money on a game I want to be able to still play it when the servers are down for maintenance ore something. Same can be said when there’s no one on at the time.
You’re saying that you don’t like multiplayer games?
I don’t like them personally, if a game is going to be multiplayer only, it had better support LAN and have bots. Nothing like paying for a game that becomes completely unplayable after a short period of time.
For me online focused games are matter of “oh looks goog…online only?..NEXT”. I really don’t enjoy playing with people mainly because a lot of online communities have shown to be awful collections of human waste.
I play almost exclusively online games as the types of games I like the most doesn’t do too well with bots in my opinion. I prefer realistic first person shooters and I’m yet to find a single game with bots being nearly as fun as real humans. This is only my personal opinion but I don’t think AI in games is quite there yet, at least not for these types of games.
If a game has an online focus, I find it hard to justify wasting time and budget on slapping on a halfassed single player unto it, I’d rather they focused on either online or single player and made it as good as possible. I can buy a single player only game when I want to play that, I don’t need both in the same game as they’re rarely both good, one (almost) always end up suffering.
As for not being able to play during maintenance, for me that’s a non-issue. I’d rather play some singleplayer focused game or another multiplayer game while waiting than playing some half baked, slapped on afterthought just because I can’t figure out something else to do while it’s down.
Maybe I’m overly harsh on this but I’ve seen countless great titles suffer because someone decided that they need to cater to everyone and include both.
Bots are never as good as human opponents, but I don’t want to be reliant on having X number of other people geographically close enough to play the game (nor be reliant one someone else’s servers, for that matter).
In the short term it’s not a problem, but when you look at it in the long run, you end up with a game that has limited lifetime. Not because the game stops to work, but because of it’s reliance on a big enough player-base. So you can’t really go back to these games, maybe to play a round or two with some friends.
A good example might be Battlefield. Battlefield2 is still pretty fun in LAN mode, because you can fill the game with bots giving you the proper battlefield experience. But in Battlefield 3 you just end up on a dead and empty server.
Another example that comes to mind would be Strike Vector. I’ve always wanted to play the game, but I’ve never bought it, because the player base died before I even got around to even thinking about buying it.
The Unreal Tournament series would be a example of a game series with great AI. All UT games actually had a relatively large offline-only player base and can still be played solo or with just a hand full of friends.
I also strongly believe that Multiplayer only games should include bots. Even if their is an active playerbase, sometimes I just really want to zone out and mow down A.I. on easy (Did that all the time with Battlefield 1942/Vietnam).
Although LAN has very much gone out of style, I hope it may start to have a bit of a resurgence now that we have small computers capable of running modern games (a la Steamboxes and whatnot) that are easier to transport around. All someone needs to do is figure out a small way of projecting a screen that doesnt suck.
I have simply made a decision not to purchase online-only games, and not spend money in ones that are free. (Although I have caved with a few games that interested me (WoT, The Division)
I play games to have fun, and let off steam. Highly competitive online games don’t work for me, because I don’t have a regular time I can play uninterrupted for a long time, and I don’t particularly want to invest my entire life in the progression of some particular clan/faction/clique of players.
Casual online games, and co-operative online games, work much better for me. For example: Helldivers! Great game, and me and some friends have a semi-regular weekly time we often play this game. When someone in particular can’t show up, that’s no big deal, and if I want to play some other time, pick-up games aren’t particularly bad.
Also, games need a solo mode where I can try things, practice and learn the game, and generally screw around, without affecting other online people.
Separately: Some people online are just ********, and I’ll drop if I find them. It would be ideal if they had to drop, rather than me, but my life is to short to tolerate mean people. (Unskilled people are fine; I’m probably below average myself.)
I’m a single-player kinda guy so I generally don’t really like multiplayer-only games. However, online-only games can also be single-player games with online functionality (think stuff like Hitman or Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, though I think both of those can also be played offline). In those cases I don’t mind it while playing but I do think it becomes problematic when you think about game preservation. Games which are truly dependant on official servers run the risk of becoming unplayable once the company shuts down those servers (for whatever reason). So yeah, if your game isn’t an outright multiplayer game that needs an online connection to even work in the first place, I think developers should think twice about making their game online-only without the option to have an offline mode. As for multiplayer games, I think it’s always a good idea to allow people to set up their own servers.