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.