Whether you love settling down for an evening of Call of Duty with your friends or prefer a more solitary, involving experience you can’t deny that mutliplayer is a growing factor in today’s industry. EA are in complete agreeance with this, saying that a multiplayer is now expected by players.
“It’s a matter of scope and value for money,” said Jeff Gamon, executive producer on Syndicate, being published by EA. “We have to think in terms of our customers and the product. I don’t think online and social modes are absolutely a requirement. It depends on the game. But it’s rapidly becoming an expectation because it’s becoming more and more common.
One might ask why this is becoming more common. A cynic might claim that it’s because publishers are demanding it, not necessarily players.
Of course this is pretty topical what with Bioware recently announcing the inclusion of co-op multiplayer in the upcoming Mass Effect 3, a game that has been lauded and loved for its powerful single player experience. While many fans have expressed dissapointment that the game has decided to offer a multiplayer mode that nobody was really asking for, Bioware have taken pains to stress that the mode will not have an adverse effect on the quality of the single player.
In my eyes there are games that are there for the multiplayer (CoD, Battlefield, Halo) and games that are there for the single player (Mass Effect, Bioshock) and that’s fine. However when publishers try and throw in multiplayer to tick a box I generally give it no more than a cursory play. It also doesn’t help that online multiplayer is such a competitive field right now that you need a very polished game to stand out. Why did Bioshock 2 need competitive multiplayer again?
For me an excellent multiplayer game in today’s industry has to be about the multiplayer from the beginning. I’ve only got a finite amount of time to spend practising one game, so I’m likely to choose the most polished and rewarding one there is – not something that was thrown together out of spare parts so EA can pretend to compete with the big boys.
Source: Eurogamer