Modern Warfare 3 teaser

It really isn't that hard to balance a system, and if a system is balanced then the only variable in success is how much publicity it gets. SP is actually hard because the story has to be worked in with the skills and balanced. Story alone is hard for most games to do, to leave it balanced throughout the game, and add new elements to keep it from getting monotonous makes it very difficult to make a good SP. MP doesn't have to worry about story and adding new elements unless it's MMORPG, all they have to worry about is balance and advertising making it much easier to accomplish.

multiplayer carries other added burdens. you speak of story, but very few games, save a handful of rpgs, handle story writting that well. most stories you see out there are generic and easy to write, and more than often, are just a tacked on layer for the gist of the thing, the gameplay. portal is much like that. most SPs out there also tend to have a problem with meddling gameplay and story together..

multiplayer partakes social analisis in a whole nother level of understanding. valve is particularly good at this. not to mention security, efficiency, accessibility. SP is just click play and let it run. multiplayer has to manage itself in real time. very high level. i always laugh when people say singleplayer is harder to do, when its actually easier from base. if you make games, you find this out very soon. of course, good original singleplayer is hard, involves depth and complexion, but so is a good multiplayer, involving statistical understanding and predictive capability. anything of remarkable is hard to achieve.

also, publicity helps either game mode. irrelevant variable.

And my point if you make a game the runs as SP the same engine will run MP with the same good balance, and if you sell it as MP then you never have to bother with a story. It's lazy design. If a game has only good MP while the SP sucks then you shouldn't be able to charge 50-60 bucks for it because it's an unfinished product. For all your technical argument, you can still take Killzone, GoW, or Halo, reskin them and they will play exactly the same with very very minor differences.

I always play through sp once or twice to see what the storyline is before playing online. I'd agree with Dray the first one was better but the second one didn't disappoint either.

MW2 and Black Ops were too easy, I know I beat both on Hard and I suck with FPS games. I played through CoD 2 on easy and BARELY beat it, compared to that current FPS are insanely easy. Don't know how easy/hard CoD4 was because I never got a chance to play it because it's STILL $30+ here.

Aardvark wrote:And my point if you make a game the runs as SP the same engine will run MP with the same good balance, and if you sell it as MP then you never have to bother with a story. It's lazy design. If a game has only good MP while the SP sucks then you shouldn't be able to charge 50-60 bucks for it because it's an unfinished product. For all your technical argument, you can still take Killzone, GoW, or Halo, reskin them and they will play exactly the same with very very minor differences.

ah, now we are putting further specifications to abide by your argument. thing is, there are games created with multiplayer in mind. Case in point: Borderlands, MMOs. there are games where they make singleplayer and then add multiplayer. Case in Point: Assassins creed series and such.

your specifying an event where the developer went out of his way to design a game(btw, engines is a whole nother level) with SP in mind, and then sells it only MP, then yes, it was stupid of him. he did his job of course, the game design is there. CoD sort of sufers from this. they create a game with SP, but the series slowly started focusing on multiplayer, without bothering to redesign their concepts, wich is why its shitty nowadays.

shitty SP is of course nowadays, very subjective and i see people require way too much of it nowadays. i laugh at those people.

last point, because a game was made in SP in a certain engine, doesnt mean that making another game in the same engine with MP is required to have SP. final case in point, the Source engine and the games made in it. thats ignorant assumption.

I'm saying they're only focusing on MP and selling it at $60, then tacking on shitty SP to justify the price. Take Reach, maybe worth $40 because it's 90% MP. The kicker it actually has some really good moments, it's just executed badly because they didn't care, they knew people "only buy Halo for the MP". Valve is successful because they realize if they sell a game for MP then it does not justify more than $20.

theyve sold games way over 20 dollars.

and i find you contradictory. you say games with Singleplayer arent worth buying for 50 bucks when they have lil more than 20 hours of gameplay, as youve confirmed this several times, but now youre saing godly designed games for multiplayer, as is the case for the Battlefield series, or JKA, wich can easily bring people in the hundreds of hours of gameplay and fun, isnt worth it for the simple fact that they lack scripted events and depth of content.... you ar basically being snobbish, ignoring price inflation(even thou digital distribution IS exagerating their prices, theres no dening that) and youre misplacing the actual worth of a game.

mw2 co op on veteran was killer.

Most multiplayers are lucky to keep me engaged for 10 hours of gameplay, I can get over 40 hours out of most SP games. But yes I am saying without those events it's not worth it, if I just want to shoot shit I'll go DL Urban Warfare for free which has as much draw as 90% of the FPS MPs out there. A story gives me a reason to play and a reason to keep playing. MP bores me because there's often no point to playing more then a round or two. The only exception I've had to this is JKA and the only reason for that is the steep learning curve that gave me something to aim for.

And Valve sells full games for over 20, TF2, Counter Strike, Portal 1(short SP only is just as bad) were all appropriately priced at $20.

and this ladies and gentleman, is how you slowly degrade ones universal statement into a personal biased opinion, making it totally, completely...........................

pointless.

No my point is still upheld, you can copy and paste most MPs out there, so there's no point to it and buying it only for the MP you can get from just about any other FPS on the market is idiotic.

incomplete generalization, without knowledge of how you do a multiplayer. there arent a lot of FPS out there for starters that are successful. a handful nowadays. halo and cod are very different games. crysis and brotherhood too. counterstrike and left 4 dead as well. very distinguished and if copied from one another, would not have efficient results.

i am telling you, as a game maker, that you will find very little evidence of copy pasting out there when it comes to multiplayer. there is a broad range of successful FPS, all different from each other in fundamental ways. perhaps 5 years ago yo would see this, but even then, i doubt it. and again, you speak of one genre now, when there are many nowadays, adding even more diversity. Multiplayer experiences can be quite full and powerful. capable of being worth as much as singleplayer ones.

the statement that a game must stand on his singleplayer to be worth something, is complete and utter bullshit.

In any given FPS MP released in the last four years you will have: A selection of only two guns for some semblance of realism, a coveted weapon that's massively unbalanced, and health or shields that regenerate way too fast. You'll probably have a gimmick now to make them seem less similar, Halo has power ups, Crysis has armor mods, even though many of these are exactly the same.

A game needs to be able to stand on SP alone, MP relies on other people doing the work of keeping the player engaged. When you're on a server full of bots in MP it's boring after about 15 minutes, so if you can't rely on the game being engaging without living people, which you will not always have in MP, then the game is not worth the money.

ah you are assuming people who buy a game for the multiplayer will spend their time in empty servers. that just comes down to knowing what youre buying.

its like going to buy left 4 dead because you wanna play it alone. thats fcking stupid. and surprisingly, you can, but the game will get really boring, really fast if you do. you buy left 4 dead to play it with other people. i would more quickly give 50 bucks for left 4 dead than i would for dragon age or fucking kotor. oh also, no shields in left 4 dead health points. and no super guns. crysis and brink use environment and ingame mods that affect how you play. aka, the go in tanking, or go in stealthy, or go in running. cod introduced the RPG elements of leveling, and makesit a great part of customization and play style. half life and source games pretty much allow you to carry a shit ton of guns. portal has no guns, bioshock is in a whole diferent league of FPS, fallout is amazingly mixed with rpg and exploration. or counter strike. health regen is there for a reason. it allows more fluid gameplay. its not better or worse than health points, its just a different tactic. they can even be mixed. if you play bad company 2, you need medics, even thou the game has health regen, because the regen can take up 1:30 minutes to fully regenerate, and all you need is a couple shots to die. so as you can see, theres a lot of variety. unless youre talking of similarities like oh they shoot each other a couple times till they die. :/
you need to play more multiplayer games aard. its not all like JKA. its realyl fucking hard being unable of finding people. hell, matchmaking pretty much eliminates that possibility almost entirely, unless you play a game thats like 6 years old. i no more blame the game for people who play alone a MP game, more than i blame the game when people level up a character wrong in a RPG, or if they dont understand what a zerg rush is in an RTS.

game offers you tools to have fun. you take them and have fun. ill also give you my steam play times to show abit of exampling. oh and, one more thing.

Mount n Blade Warband. it has a good SP, but people like me and Cog, and many others bought it for the MP. i suck at it, but i think its really good and really engaging.

Keep in mind that i wont list all my games, some i didnt enjoy, or havent had the time to play them. i will list examples of SP and MPs i did enjoy.

Alien Swarm, MP only, 40 hours

Battlefield Bad Company 2, tacked on SP, MP driven game, 132 hours

Borderlands, MP almost entirely, capable of singleplayer, but created for CO OP, havent finished, 42 hours.

Dead Space, SP only, 16 hours

Dragon Age 2, extensive and dragging RPG at times, 110 hours, 4 playthroughs, will NOT be making another one.

Half Life Saga, all combined, SP ONLY, 23 hours.

Just Cause 2, sandbox SP only, proly the closest an SP game gets to replayability fun, 27 hours.

Lara Croft and Guardian of Light, co op game capable of sp, i only played SP, 7 hours. suspect playing in co op would triple that number.


Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, capable of SP, but pretty much made for MP co op, 140 hours. prolly some of the best fun ive had ever playing video games in my entire life. champ can vouch for that.

magicka, co op, buggy wich hinders capability of playing, around 30 hours(counting offline hours as well).

mass effect, highly praised RPG, 24 hours.

mount n blade warband, around 15 hours, but im planning to play the shit out of it in summer.

overlord saga, SP ONLY, gfunny game, 20 hours.

portal 1, 87 minutes lol

portal 2, 22 hours, counting half that time spent with lucky fuckin around in co op.

jka.................................................................dun need to speak of this one.

republic commando, awesome FPS, sp, 7 hours.

kotor, prolly around 50 hours. xfire would be better since i played most of my playthroughs before i used steam.

Yeah you didn't pay $60, $30 is more appropriate for just MP.

And I play at weird times I've been on Halo within a year after it came out and found no one around, been on Crysis 2 and found no one, or worse found people who promptly booted me from the game for no reason. At least if a game has a good SP you're guaranteed a good time, whereas you can't guarantee a thing with MP. And Horror game=/= FPS. They're in their own genre as by default a horror game focuses on survival more then killing.

No game is worth $60 unless you can guarantee a good game with over 50 hours of gameplay, and since MP cannot guarantee anything you have to judge based on SP.

thats different, i almos never pay 60 bucks for any game. i buy on sales. i am speaking on a same value basis thou. if i paid 60 bucks regularly for games, i would not make the MP/SP factor a buying factor.

also, having singleplayer does not guarantee 50 hours of good fun aard.youre speaking out of your ass now. wether it is single or multiplayer, you have to make it engaging for it to be fun.

of all the games i have, multiplayers endured the most and game me the best memories, mainly cause i experienced them with friends and closed ones, or hell, just meeting other people in the wastelands of the internet, giving me a real world connection. quality and complexity are not in discussion here. you dont buy a big mac because it is a food gourmet masterpiece. you buy it cause its fucking good. and multiplayer can be fucking good. guaranteed. at least guaranteed as much as a singleplayer is of givng you fun.

also, if this is how you buy games, have fun with that, but dont go making it a universal law of quality. there are milions of people who play multiplayer everyday to proove you wrong on that.

I can research a game and play the demo to figure out if the SP will be worth the time, MP is never a guarantee simply because you cannot guarantee people to play with or people WORTH playing with. Look at the Crysis 2 MP Demo, wasn't worth shit, didn't even get 5 hours out of it because 4 out of 5 times when I connected I either couldn't find a populated server to connect to, or if I did I got kicked from it for no reason. I seriously got more time out of the Mirror's Edge SP Demo and it was actually fun. I've played countless MP only games or MP centric games where this was a problem, that or the in-game store was so fucked up that if you didn't pay you just played to get killed from a mile away while your guns shoots every way but straight.

taht is a problem of demos, no?. i speak with the experience of fully enjoyed games. and the experiences of many many people who have fun and countless hours in servers with others. like, you know, this clan.

I do not have many games i bought JUST for MP. The delta force series i have (typhoon rising, joint Ops, extreme, x2) Portal 2 i got partially for the MP experience.

Most of the games i have are for SP and MP experiences. hard for me to buy a game JUST to play it on line.

that is entirely personal, and i have nothing to say to that.

i simply disagree that games made with that purpose lack the same value singleplayers do. its simply personal, and its not universally measurable, or at least, as measurable as singleplayer experiences are.

If a demo can't actually demonstrate a game then it's a very bad sign for the game isn't it? And I too have played many MP games to TRY and get interested but only two have ever held my attention for more then a few hours and those had self-engaging aspects in them that made up for the lack of people around. Pto is in the right here, you can buy a game for both, it makes sense, but you can only reliably judge SP because people make the difference. If I play JKA with 30 different newbs I'll get a completely different reaction than if I play it with 5 people I know. So if I play two session I will not get the same verdict, ergo judging the MP becomes unreliable.

I would agree it is subjective. i would not pay $30 for a game that is JUST MP. even pay to play games are not smart in my opinion. (WOW, EverQuest) it does not make sense to buy the game AND pay someone else so i can play it.