I’d like to start this article by being honest with you readers. The truth, is that I don’t like multiplayer. I started playing games when I was a kid and I continue to play games to this day for one simple reason: to immerse myself in a story and a world that isn’t my own. For me, the only way to do that is in a game with an amazing story and a well-crafted world. I know I’m not the only one either, but my friends, our beloved single-player is in danger. Which brings me to the question of the day: are single-player games dying?. It’s a scary thought, but one that has been brought up more times than I’d care to count. Today we face the beast head on and find out once and for all if our beloved way of gaming is dying. Echoes in Time: Industry Expert Predictions From Recent Years Industry experts have already tackled this subject in the past, and the trend wasn’t good. Back in 2011 during the Game Developer’s Conference, Mark Cerny Gave journalists a heart attack when he said “the traditional single-player experience will be gone in three years. Right now you sit in your living room and you’re playing a game by yourself. We call it the sp mission, or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook, I just don’t think that’s going to last.” This comment came during a time where games that had no business having multiplayer (Bioshock, God of War, etc) were receiving shoehorned multiplayer modes that ultimately detracted from the single-player experience. Meanwhile, the opposite seemed to be true of games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. These games were 90% multiplayer and 10% single-player in the form of a blockbuster campaign that lasted an average of 4 hours. Not even a day after Mark Cerny’s comment, a contractor for Activision by the name of Keith Fuller said in an interview with CNN that “90 percent of players who start your game will never see the end of it unless they watch a clip on YouTube.” Now that opens an entirely different discussion on Let’s plays, but we’ll cover that another time. Also I would like to point out that Activision would blame the gamers for a problem they helped create. As more and more developers felt the pressure to put multiplayer in their games, that responsibility fell to the single-player team. Instead of devoting 100% effort into the story of the game, now teams were split and the overall quality suffered as a result. To try and combat that, sometimes the multiplayer was developed by an entirely different team which caused even worse differences between the single-player and multiplayer quality. Speaking of corporate giants who like to make sweeping decisions, if you look at EA, they have the same mindset, albeit a little less “multiplayer only.” They, like Ubisoft are more interested in “connected experiences” where you’re always online in some way, shape or form. … Read More