I've asked this question on c/gaming, but I'd love to see what KotakuinAction2's members think of this topic:
In an age where every game genre from shooters, strategy, fighting, and racing games are seeing a decreased emphasis on single-player content and in some cases, obstructing the single-player experience through mechanics like forced Internet connections to save progress, I want to ask this community:
Do you think the increased push behind esports and dedication of more resources to it has ruined gaming?
I've noticed that developers have been increasingly neglecting the offline experience and sometimes making some features exclusive to the online modes.
Take how Rockstar stopped adding content to the single-player mode of GTA V, Blizzard and Respawn omitted single-player modes from extremely popular games like Overwatch and Apex Legends, and how racing games like GT7 and the upcoming Forza 2023 are forcing everyone to play online to "prevent cheating", even those that would never touch multiplayer.
Do you think that this has done more damage to gaming in the long run? Do you see things ever trending back toward a more balanced approach where both single player and multiplayer gamers are equally accommodated?
How do you think developers can know that they're alienating a big part of their player base by focusing so extensively if that's how you feel?
Would love to see your thoughts on this topic.
It's certainly strengthened the impetus for the overarching cancer which is games as services and turning gamers into paypig whales to be eternally milked and bilked. If as a dev you sell players on the idea that your game is something to be played competitively, for big bucks worldwide, possibly even as a route to e-fame, then the game needs a perpetual referee. The game implicitly becomes accepted as a service. Players feel they need to pay to keep the dev around forever, in order to keep the balance fair, and they have to buy the season pass to stay updated on all the new characters, etc. the game can't ever be allowed to stay static or shrink in its appeal because then it's failed as a competitive exercise.
In the past you had smaller, organic competitive communities for multiplayer games, with P2P connections and community servers. There was no need for centralised servers and no need for centralised rules enforcement because the community would pick and play whatever version of the game they liked. Don't like some silly modded lowgrav server? Don't go there. Think a guy's cheating? Voteban - okay that's not perfect but if someone does get away with cheating in that context, at least there's not a shitload of money involved, which also means the incentive to cheat isn't tied to real world success. The more corporate money you introduce, the more the scale expands and the more incentive there is to take the controls away from the community and put them in the hands of some overlord. And eventually that removal of control extends down to the level of what you're allowed to say and do in-game, or even outside the game, because X company doesn't want to be associated with muhsogginy/whatever. At that point, you're a short hop from the community's transformation into virtue signalling faggots whom you wouldn't want to play a game with anyway. Pretty much where I'm at with SF6 - not buying that shit.
Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, because I'll always prefer single player games for other reasons. Generally I think there's too much focus on meta-gaming and solving things as a community. It can be an interesting thing to do, but there's a tendency towards groupthink. If a story or piece of entertainment has something to offer me as a solo experience, or among a small number of likeminded individuals, then that's that - I don't want or need to hear some internet autismo sperging over damage values and 'optimal' techniques that he's regurgitating from his favourite YT speedrunner tranny, to have a good time. Quite the opposite.
I hate this trend. I was just talking about this a few days ago with one of the few gaming buddies I still have. Stuff I grew up on was so simplistic, Dooms and Quakes, early Halos and CoDs. There weren't stats, if there were loadouts it was fairly simplistic. There wasn't a lot to balance because there just wasn't a lot of variables. Now everything is infested with places you can min/max and if you aren't either testing it yourself for hours on end or cheating off someone else who does online, you are at a disadvantage.
The gameplay was simple too, that's actually what got me started on the topic. I was just trying to tell him that my old brain is just not interested in trying to learn all these advanced movement mechanics at the high speed and precision the people that grew up on that stuff do. It's funny too, because I've dragged some of these younger gamers into my type games and they are just as fish out of water without their sliding, double jumping, structure building, etc. as I am in their stuff.
Yeah, there's something about enjoying games 'as a community' that gives me the heebie-jeebies. It used to be that people would experience a game on their own, they'd seek out others who enjoyed it in the same way, and a community would form organically. This whole thing of outsourcing your own understanding of the game by immediately seeking out the community's interpretation of the mechanics (and even the story, through youtuber analysis videos) just feels off to me. It's more like an ARG and a psychological trick than real enjoyment. People got rabidly excited for Valve's ARG in the buildup to Portal 2, they went crazy for PT... but 'solving things as a community' isn't gaming, it's something else, and becomes indistinguishable from marketing very quickly.
I don't even dislike that modern games can require a lot of deep analysis. I'm usually pretty good at getting a feel for high level mechanics on my own, even nowadays. I just don't ever really trust this modern ecosystem where everyone looks to everyone else in order to figure out how to play. It should never be required in a single player game. Sekiro was a great example IMO - most of the community of Fromsoft memers, stream watchers and metagamers did not know how to play, and in the process of not knowing how to play, they gave eachother atrocious ideas on to how to play. Anyone who shut off the net, took the game on its own terms and learnt how to play properly was far better off.
I don't think it's deep analysis that bothers me at all. I mean I'm sure a ton of people saw my rant about not needing games to be hard in another post, so yeah I don't really like what most people call hard games. Really, I just prefer difficulty to be moved to strategy or puzzles and less on reflexes and timing. So I should like deep games.
What bugs me is more of a phenomenon since a lot of games went from LAN and small server play to widely online. If there's cheese tactics among friends in a small group, you can agree to cut it out, work together to figure it out, etc. Online, you damn well better enjoy getting kicked in the crotch by the meta of the month until you follow the meta or it gets patched out.
Another causality of the lack of dedicated servers, It would be the solution to the problem. And even where you have queue pools for quickplay and stuff, all you need is to make it so people can make their own queues etc.
When your ideas are applied to racing games (my favorite genre), it sounds like they're specifically being turned into always-online live services because an entire generation of consoomers has successfully been fooled into thinking that spending their entire lives playing these games every hour of the day online (we tend to call this "no-lifing" a game BTW) will be their tickets to real-world professional racing stardom a la Jann Mardenborough or Lucas Ordonez.
So, because so many people focus so much on the online portion of these games and demand more regulation and attention to them from the developers, this is the part of the game developers commit most to.
Anyone who just wants to play the game for fun gets neglected by the developers because they're too busy basing their game around being the subject of the next feel-good media story.
It sounds like you're saying that the pursuit for unrealistic fame and fortune is what ruined games rather than esports specifically.
What do you think some solutions to this could be in the long term?
Hell they made a movie out of one of those stories
Not exactly, as I say I think the overarching cancer is always-online stuff, microtransactions, etc. Devs were already pushing this without esports, which I'd define as corporate cash-driven competitive gaming, and not every game is compatible with that. Esports gives devs another route towards normalising it, in player expectations, but like others have said, esports didn't create this landscape.
I don't know anything about racing esports, but I've heard a little about the famous names playing iRacing and such. I'd be interested to hear how that scene has played out. But Forza for example is already kind of cancerous in terms of DLC and devs punishing players for custom decals, etc. yet afaik that isn't being driven by competitive gaming, am I right?
With games that have gone the esports route, it's like you say. Anyone playing for fun has to play second fiddle to mercenaries and metagamers in terms of dev priorities, plus they have to put up with a sterile, stiff sense of community and lots of cynical cashgrabs. There isn't any way back from that IMO, until the money dries up.
Apparently, car racing esports are not nearly as popular as sponsors and developers make them out to be.
Your average sanctioned iRacing event can barely get 5,000 views on YouTube, the official esports teams have very small social media presences and only like and retweet each others tweets; and at official Gran Turismo and F1 esports events, the crowd sizes tend to be rather underwhelming.
When you do see an audience, that's because it's mostly made up of sponsors, VIP members, and family members. There is almost no organic, grassroots fanbase around racing esports.
Gran Turismo Sport was curated around esports to the extent of being online only, and only a fraction of that game's players play the esports modes it was designed around.
Furthermore, that game has official FIA (the promoter for WRC, F1, and other big name real world racing leagues) championships, and the participants don't even get paid. They all have to pay for their own travel and accommodation, and in especially egregious cases, have had to give controllers and other prizes earned in the events back to the organizers.
All those hours spent behind the wheel of a pretend racecar, sacrificing one's life to become a top pro racing game player; are essentially for nothing other than maybe bragging rights. The same is almost certainly true of GT's contemporaries like iRacing as well.
Never been serious enough to get into iRacing but I've done some other sim racing games like Assetto Competizione and paid a bit of attention to iRacing. My opinion they thought through a lot of the issues other games have and tried to fix. DLC aside perhaps, it is NOT a cheap game to play.
It's a monthly sub that I think runs about $15 a month and doesn't include a ton of cars and tracks. Then the cars and tracks are pretty pricey. None of it comes off as predatory or rewarding no-lifes in that respect though. No lootboxes, no battle pass where you play 100 hours in a week and you unlock exclusive cars. You want something, you exchange money for it.
It's still really serious and a time and money sink, and that's why I've never taken the plunge.
I want to encourage everyone on this forum to check out the YouTube channel Austin Ogonoski.
He's done an excellent job of breaking down what really happens behind the scenes of racing game culture and how it has sometimes even affected real world racing. He has also discussed how esports participants in this genre are essentially tricked into thinking they'll be big stars by dedicating their whole life to a game only to be taken advantage of by greedy promoters.
He's currently a game tester, but also an oval race car driver at the grassroots level and a former aide in the mental health field, so he knows exactly what he's talking about having come from all these scenes and understood their respective ins and outs.
He's also discussed how the esports to real life racing stars are grossly misrepresented in the media. Essentially, such drivers like the GT Academy graduates and NASCAR racers like Josh Berry or Willliam Byron already had a good amount of real world race experience; therefore, their performances in video games were simply another way the people around them helped market them to teams and sponsors better.
I think his channel is well worth your time. A good starting point would be his videos on Jason Jacoby, essentially the Chris-Chan of racing games.