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.
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.