Multiplayer has become a power word within the industry these past few years; especially if your talking about First and Third Person Shooters. The commonly held belief is that you MUST have multiplayer in order to compete and make money. This belief has led to a vast improvement in multiplayer gaming of late. It has also lead to some seriously crappy multiplayer too.
Wanted: Weapons of Fate executive producer Pete Wanat is of the opinion that developers waste resources adding multiplayer modes to titles that don’t need them.
Check out what Pete Wanat had to say about multiplayer and a few choice counterpoints of my own after the jump!
Wanted: Weapons of Fate, based on last year’s feature film Wanted, hits store shelves March 23rd for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. This movie tie-in is not being forced to arrive alongside the film. Couple that with the, at least, initially positive previews and I, for one, am starting to get hyped. I am hyped despite the fact that Weapons of Fate will not include any multiplayer whatsoever. Check out this gameplay trailer for a glimpse at what could be.
During a recent appearance on GameSpot’s HotSpot podcast, Pete Wanat talked about why Weapons of Fate will not have multiplayer and why he believes developers often waste time on multiplayer modes their games don’t need.
Wanat said: “For the most part, we waste our money and our time building multiplayer levels,” Wanat said. “And why do we do this? Because a couple years ago the press was all about saying, ‘This game has to have multiplayer, there’s no replayability.’ F*** that. That’s a bad joke.”
There is some truth to the above, in that the press, and to a certain extent the public, have been making multiplayer a bigger deal than it really is. A strong single player campaign remains very important to a lot of gamers (yours truly included) and the lack of multiplayer can often be overlooked by how great everything else is. Max Payne for example.
Of course, if your making a FPS or TPS, deciding not to have multiplayer is a really risky decision. Neither genre is known for having lengthy single player campaigns, and aside from achievements and trophies, little incentive exists to prompt players to play through more than once or twice. Multiplayer DOES add to replayabilty in a very major way for shooters. Throw in all the extra single player modes you like, sooner or later gamers get bored shooting bots over and over again. For shooters multiplayer is the mainstay of replayability. That’s not a bad joke, it’s a f***ing fact! (Wanat swore first!)
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I am a sad billy no mates, and so for me single player game quality is key. I think that these days adding multiplayer is often seen as a short-cut to increasing the playability and longevity of below par games without actually improving the core gameplay and quality.
I believe we will see a growing division between MP’rs, ala COD, Killzone, MAG etc, games and SP’rs games, ala Wanted, Bioshock, Fallout etc, with only a few brave or misguided souls entering the middle ground.
Fallout 3 would probably be the most recent successful FPS game.
That said, I think he raises a good point, but I think it’s a copout to say a company can’t do both.
Thing is, I understand that there should be no multiplayer in those kinda games, but are they still gonna charge me the same as a game with good single player and multiplayer parts?
Fallout 3 wasn’t an fps. I would unload 3 clips of an ak into a guy without doing damage, so no.
For an fps to not need multi-player it just has to be an incredible game, like bioshock. I had no grievance with that game. That was a perfect title. And if you really want to say your game doesn’t need multi-player then you have a standard set. While games don’t always have to be that phenomenal, they should be damn close.
Multiplayer fits certain games. If a game developer wants to make an incredibly cinematic game with great story, atmosphere etc, then they should just stick with that and make it as good as they can. I don’t often play multiplayer with my friends locally as they don’t come round much, and most of my friends on XBL play different games to me, so I usually just move onto a bit of multiplayer once I’ve finished the single player. For me, single player is better, but it’s still great to have the multiplayer on the side like COD 4 and W@W. Really, once you’ve done the campaigns in FPS’s, as they’re usually pretty short, you need multiplayer otherwise the game’s longevity will be virtually nonexistent.
I look at a game like Army of Two, a decent coop game, then I look at it’s multiplayer mode and puke. Army of Two is a good example of a game that didn’t need a versus mode… or atleast not the versus mode it had. If they sold it without it, they could have spent that time further polishing the campaign.
Multiplayer is vital to ME playing a game.
Its funny how there is less of an uproar when a game has no multiplayer rather than when it has no Single Player (multiplayer only)- despite it being a great game (Shadowrun)
there is no upraor because you know what your gonna buy so you expect it to be good. You dont have to have such hopes, because if it sucks, it atleast does so with other. But a crap single player is just a super let down.
Classically, multiplayer has always been mostly a marketing tool. It only creates replay value when enough man power is pumped into developing that portion of the game (ie Goldeneye or Halo 2). However, I will admit that I’ve completely ignored Single Player mode in some games and only played multiplayer as in the case of Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. Something is to be said for that. It’s a really tricky dichotomy to balance.
Gears of war 2 has the best in multiplayer and weapons at that. There’s nothing like this third person shooter and nothing can campare. Lots of gamers around the world player on XBL and still do and even in the first game 2 years after its release games were full on XBL. In my opinion gears 2 is the best till (IF) they make a third game which they will cuz at the end the story was to be continued.
my long
You’re forgetting the fact that sooner or later, a game’s online experience degenerates into a mass of M16 using 10 year olds. (CoD 4). No multiplayer – No smegheads to ruin it.
And BTW, Fallout 3 isn’t a FPS. It’s an RPG.