Interesting read: Why most multiplayer-only FPS games fail
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
in Gaming
This level designer posits that it's not DLC or revenue model or lack of community features that does it:
http://www.cpazgamedesign.com/uncategorized/why-arent-multiplayer-only-shooters-catching-on/
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I'd like to see his thoughts on some other multiplayer only FPSes.... the Battlefield series and Dust 514 come to mind.
BF 1942, BF2, and BF3 all had single-player options.
I think the big issue with all of these multiplayer-only endeavors is that they're not extensible by the community. The publisher urge and desire to completely control all aspects of content, probably for revenue reasons, has created an array of one-dimensional and repetitive games that cannot scale to the appetite of the community playing the game.
If I think of all the first-person games that have strongly captured lasting communities, they've been moddable: Quake, Half Life, UT, Skyrim, etc. The appetite to play new content, and create new content to play, is a community-driven feedback loop that produces endless replayability and new experiences.
But with games like Battlefront or Titanfall, an initially exhilarating experience ultimately becomes a very repetitive effort with significantly diminishing returns. And then the publishers move on to another title, and whatever community is left withers and dies.
and bf4
Ehhhh.... I don't know about 1942 or 3, but BF2's single-player option was just the multiplayer option with a bunch of bots. That's not a single player option as far as I'm concerned. It's just multiplayer for recluses.
The key is that they were all playable (BF3 has a defined story, even) without the need for the community. You could buy BF2 3 years after release, play single-player for a while to get a feel for everything, then venture out into the online battles.
Now, if you're not a release-day buyer and start playing a lot right away, games like Titanfall are almost completely non-playable because everyone is already good and has tons of epic stuff and you get blasted to oblivion 10 sec after spawn.
That wasn't the problem with those games according to the article, at least from my reading. The complaints had more to do with the inability of them to get/stay in the flow zone. One way is for it to be way too hard, but the other is for it to be too boring. Frankly, I found BF2 to be incredibly boring.... even though I was lousy at it, so logically it should have fallen into the Anxiety/Panic side of the flow zone, I still just found it boring. It's why I never bothered to buy BF3. I had the same issue with Dust 514 to an extent. I really WANTED to like Dust 514 because FPS Eve Online, but I just found it horribly boring.
Titanfall has an interesting (though brief) single-player campaign that doubles as a tutorial. It was fun to play. It even gives you a leg up on multiplayer by unlocking some unique mechs and weapons.
I disagree that the lack of SP is the culprit for the quick abandonment of these games. And those campaigns rarely teach you how to be good against live players. No, the basic issue is that every one of these MP-only games fundamentally never evolve beyond the same experience you get on day one. You get more weapons, points and gadgets, but you're always stuck on the same maps, playing the same game types, on the same servers.
There's no player agency. No sense of ownership or influence. No wonder people abandon ship quickly.
And let's not forget the two ultimate multplayer FPS with massive longevity: TF2 and Counterstrike (and yes, both were mods)
And both are supremely moddable with custom maps, Steam Workshop integration, etc.
For some of these franchises you have to wonder if players moving on is a problem for developers. Battlefield, COD and others are releasing the next iteration of their game like clockwork so would they want players to move on from their old game to the newest $60 version of it?
It is a different game market today than it was for Quake and Half-Life with so many games being available at the push of a button. Gamer ADD where people switch between the games they play happens all the time. The games that are continually developed and engage their player base with interesting and compelling multiplayer content are keeping their player base the best.
Yeah. Who wants people to play last year's game? They're not subscription services at this point. Get them onto the next game as soon as you can.
Would the difficulty in making maps for these games have anything to do it? TF2 and CS maps would probably be less complex compared to Titanfall.
Not only more difficult but considerably less likely to ever be played.
What if I told you the flow is intentionally manufactured as part of the long term buisness model. Razor manufactuers could design longer lasting blades but.....
The money is in creating temporary excitement, then letting it fizzle after the money has been made so they can start to manufacture excitement for the thing you are working on so the cycle continues.
Valve has another massive revenue stream so TF2 can go on forever.
Titanfall, Battlefront are intentiinally awesome for about twenty or thirty hours... EA has got expansion packs and new games to sell, so it is the financial model. Money drives everything, anyone that wants to argue around that hasn't been bored to death in enough quaterly meetings to know any better.
while i understand why they do it, i am somewhat of an idealist, so i propose a compromise model. single player games have (usually) limited replay value, so these are the games that should be made with the built in obsolescence. i think we could all agree that if we buy a multiplayer only game, we buy it with a friend(s) and expect to play together for quite some time. i feel like multiplayer started as a way to extend the replay value of a game and somewhere along the line, that was lost.
tl;dr let single player games fizzle, but multiplayer only games need to be designed to last
Brings some possibly valid points to the discussion, but it seems to read like it wants to be a research article while not really having research so much as observations.
There's a game I'm in on the alpha test for and while it's an ok to decent game, the dev and customer support involvement seems to be the real glue. I've seen them turn trolls into thoughtful players, idiots into valuable sources of input, and they regularly actively discuss all sorts of things and even hop in and play with players. Who knows if that will last on release, but it's interesting to see that kind of influence on the community.