magerette
Hedgewitch
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This article from U.K. news source The Guardian, explores the effects of the increasing popularity of online gaming on the single-player experience. The Guardian talks with several industry figures, including Chris Early of Microsoft Casual Games, Mitch Gitelmen (Shadowrun) and Flagship Studio's CEO, Bill Roper.
Conclusion? Both play styles have merit, each having it's own distinct set of strengths and weaknesses:If you can play with real people, why settle for robots? That's a sentiment which resonates with much of the gaming community, if industry trends and sales figures are anything to go by. Blizzard's online roleplaying game, World of Warcraft, reached 9 million subscribers in July. Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service was a major selling point for the Xbox 360. Most recent big-budget action games support multiplayer functionality. Even some largely single-player titles - such as Neverwinter Nights - enjoy continuing sales long after release due to the astonishing amount of online content available. Are single-player, AI-driven games becoming a thing of the past?...
Chris Early, studio manager of the Microsoft Casual Games service and Live representative, is even-handed in his judgment. He thinks single-player gaming still has its place but that the execution is important. "There are narratives and stories you can tell through single-player experiences that you simply can't tell through multiplayer," he says. "At the same time, there are experiences you can't deliver in single-player that only multiplayer can achieve...
If there's one upcoming single-player title that could profess to provide a completely new experience each time you play the game, it's Flagship Studios' Hellgate: London. Built entirely upon randomised content, the virtual demon-infested London through which players will be traipsing will have a different layout each time. Essentially, Hellgate offers infinite replayability."We love randomisation," says Bill Roper, Flagship's CEO. "It adds so much replayability to the game, as there is always the chance that a player will find something new, or emergent behavior will create a new experience. When done right, randomisation doesn't come off as being random - which is kind of an odd way to think about it. Basically, you don't want your environments to feel haphazardly slapped together. You want them to feel cohesive and coherent. This sort of thing is the real challenge and art of creating a highly randomised game, and is why you don't see many of them
More information.However, multiple players means that it is more difficult to tell a story. Single-player games, by contrast, are compelling in the way that the player interacts with well-crafted plotlines and characters. However, many would argue that allowing players total control over a game's story - by essentially removing story completely - cannot result in a particularly engaging narrative.
Mitch Gitelman, studio manager on Shadowrun, a multiplayer shooter, disagrees. "Social gameplay absolutely lends itself to storytelling," he argues, "but it's going to be 'watercooler stories' about the amazing move or tight win your team made last night, rather than a story created by the game designers that you're allowed to interact with...
This is a step change for Shadowrun, where previous instalments in the franchise were highly regarded single-player RPGs. So does this move to exclusively online content suggest that single-player gaming is reaching its expiry date? Gitelman says that the move to online is the result of the team's experience with online gaming...
So will Shadowrun return to its story-based roots? "There is definitely a market and demand for a more conventional single-player action/RPG based in the Shadowrun universe," he says. "I'd love to see it get created. But what would really be cool is a meta game - story game, in other words - that could be affected by the multiplayer play. There's a challenge for game designers."
- Joined
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