Why does it feel like AAA single player games are dying...
Yes, I realize we got a couple decent single player games this year like botw, mario odyssey, etc, but if you think about it there really weren't that many.
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Very little to do once you've beaten them, and as I get older I find I have less time or willingness to replay than when I was younger.
Monster hunter world coming out next year, can be played solo or with up to 3 others
With AAA games, you buy them for the 35-60 hrs of gameplay. Once you've beaten the game, there really isn't much to do afterwards.
MOBAS, games like Overwatch, sports and even hearthstone, are all centralized around competing against others and improving your skill. Meaning even after the gameplay seems bland or boring, the time spent doesnt feel like a waste because you have a skill that you can use.
Its an illusion lol
There is no shortage of single player games.
It has nothing to do with fun.
Single-player games aren't as profitable. They have a finite engagement time and it's harder to sell microtransactions to people. Multiplayer games also tend to be more addictive, which is a good thing for the company because it builds inertia and makes customers more likely to purchase your future products.
The move from singleplayer games to multiplayer ones is a business decision, not because they're better or anything.
There are many single player AAA games coming out. We've got Horizon Zero Dawn with unique setting and well designed open world that actually works with core-gameplay, Hellblade with presenting mental disorder in mature and very creative way - no other game did that before to such extent and no other executed it so well, Zelda took exploration and emergent gameplay to the next level, The Last Guardian has interesting and very unique mechanics, Wolfenstein II once again revived old school FPS while also adding something unique to it - humanising protagonist through absurd situations and actions which is pretty original.
This year wasn't as heavy in AAA releases as let's say 2015 but the actual quality of these games vastly improved comparing it to 2015 (dull, boring and lazy Fallout 4, Witcher 3 albeit good left much to desire, Arkham Knight was dissapointing) so IMO this year was pretty solid and I'm all for quality over quantity. I would rather play one decent game than 10 Assassin's Creeds/Fallouts/CoDs or other uncreative and lazy products.
I have been reading books more than playing games as I get older.
Publishers discovered multiplayer games are more lucrative. At least we still get single player games from Bethesda.
Well for me personally, I have a X1 (two of them) and a crap load of games including the one series I used to ball out on (CoD) but I feel I just simply have less time to invest in Life, Work, League, Sleep, that playing other games I want to such as CoD, RPGs and other Xbox games are simply just weeded out of my time. To me it's not about the payment of a game that I won't play for hundreds of hour, specially since most I get on black fridays so there at least 20$ cheaper, it's just hard to want to play it more then trying to get better at League. I imagine other people have similar problems with whatever major Mutli player game.
Shit I'd like to play some Runescape more and if I played Xbox rpgs, I could at the very least AFK some 120s, where as in League I often stop trying to afk Rs while I play it. On top of wanting to work other stats towards 120 lol.
Multiplayer is just straight up more fun for most people.
Still, FFXV (a bit over as year, coming to PC soon), BoTW, SMO, Xenoblade 2, ACO (if you can actually run it..).
Idk whether single-player is dying or not, but I can say that I stopped playing single-player games over a decade ago. The last single-player game I bought was Twilight Princess on Gamecube, and I didn't get half way through it before quitting. After playing online games, solo console games just feel lonely and very pre-determined.
Right now I'm playing Black Desert. I play it like a single-player game, but I have a guild and friend list I can chat with to get help, suggestions, or discuss classes and gear. That sort of thing is pretty much an essential feature for any game I play now.
Even with League, a big part of what keeps me involved is the reddit main communities and a couple players on my friend list that I have played with off and on for a couple years now.
Single player games don't make as much money. Nothing else to it. Dev studios just don't really care about gaming as a whole anymore, they just want to line their pockets.
And don't try to say BOTW and Odyssey were amazing, either.
Multiplayer games are just a better investment business wise.
I prefer single player games, but I can't fault companies for wanting to make the games that'll make them the most cash.
Harder to put in microtransactions in single player games
Guess who didn't put microtransactions in their games this year. Nintendo. And guess which console sold the most this year. The Switch. Gee I wonder why...
Mario Odyssey was designed for people with ADHD. You get a frickin moon every 30 seconds. It's really missing the charm of the older titles.
Have you ever played Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? Greatest game to ever exist on this planet.
The "multiplayer has more content and singleplayer only has 30-60 hrs of content" is often a fallacy.
Multiplayer is just often just <1 hr of gameplay repeated 10000 times; not necessarily mean a 30-60 hrs of uniquely crafted experience that singleplayers tend to be. You can say you can play different champs like say in LoL, well the same goes for replaying the said singleplayer game with different setup, class, and whatnot.
Multiplayer doesn't necessarily offer more varied content.
The thing with people loving multiplayer is actually NOT that multiplayer games offer more varied experiences like some would claim, but rather it's actually the complete opposite. People like the same experience over and over, which is a bit strange because players typically don't like "replaying" singleplayer games but do it for every multiplayer game anyway. This is why CoD and Halo and whatnot continues to be the most bought game even though every iteration is kinda the same thing over and over, and how LoL is still the most played game despite being on the same map for eternity with the EXACT same meta for the past like 4-5 years.
And I do have issues with industry and the players keep buying into this same fallacy while letting the singleplayer games out to die, on top of having no idea of what is and what is not.
because this is year of the lootbox and it's easier to implement those in multiplayer games
As someone else said, I don't know if single payer games are dying but I for one hope not. I enjoy single player games more than multiplayer. That's not to say I don't enjoy Overwatch, League, Swtor or Elder scrolls online . But I am mostly driven my storylines and characters when I decide to play a game, which is why personally I Bioware games, Bethesda game, various Jrpgs or things like Dishonored. Many of those single players games have plenty of replay value. I do not think I am the only one that feels that way so I don't think single player games will ever completely go away.
Well, stop being a Nintendo fanboy and maybe you will notice games from other companies.
There's less time to play games and more incentive to pour money into them. Notice the influx of lootboxes and multiplayer games with loads of cosmetic items? Few people seem to have the time or patience to sink 60-70+ hours into a game nowadays. It's all about instant gratification and style over substance. Nobody cares about meaningful plots or complex, original characters anymore. They just want to steal their parent's credit cards so they can buy fancy looking weapon or armor skins and brag about how it makes them so much better than you.
It's a fifty-fifty split on who to blame for this, at least as far as I can tell. On one hand, you have younger generations becoming incredibly shallow. Looks are everything now, and anything beyond surface-level is unimportant or a waste of time. As long as the character looks cool their backstory could be some shitty fan-fiction level narrative we've seen a million times, since nobody is going to read it anyways. On the other hand, we have the business side. Devs and publishers have noticed this trend with younger people and decided to take advantage of it. Instead of continuing to make decent story-based games in an effort to show them how interesting and meaningful games can be, they cater to the idiots they can make money off of.
Now I'm not saying that everybody is like this. There are still plenty of people who care about single--player games (myself included) and developers who are in the business to make fun, engaging, and relevant games. The problem is that they are the minority and, as long as the current trend continues, we're going to lose single-player games entirely. After all, these well-meaning devs can't make good games if they aren't making enough money to support themselves.
I say all this as a 20-year-old who grew up on single-player games like Final Fantasy, Shadow of the Colossus, Metroid Prime, and the older Zelda games. I don't want to accept it, but that's just the way of the world. It changes, so there's no point trying to contest it. I'm just hopeful that one day people will get sick of this greedy shit and single-player games will make a comeback.
It has to do with a mixture of publishers and "studies" they do. They like to say that SP games are dying because they want them to, MP games are more lucrative from a $$$ standpoint. Pay for game, dlc, online, and whatever little shit they can get you to shill out for. They want players to play a multiplayer game for months and months by keeping them invested financially. And because of this we get systems like destiny and battlefront that are in it for money and not the game.
whereas SP games have to earn the money through solid merit, and have dlc and extra content, but don't have the crutch of multiplayer add ons that you would be surprised how much they make.
People now a days are awful when it comes to attention span, and if they can keep people longer than a week it will Succeed. Hell. I'm guilty, I beat the new asscreed in a week. Love it, but has little replay value. But I highly recommend playing it still. Nothing beats the sp experience imo. However there is a point where mp games get stale and samey, so sp isn't the only offender.
Tales of Berseria was fire, yo! Gotta look for those gems.
I'm looking forward to the new God of War and Kingdom Hearts 3 also the makers of Infamous(Sucker Punch Productions) are making a new samurai game that looks cool. https://www.suckerpunch.com Overall I feel that it may be best to look forward to next year for some good games.
It's pretty much because people are connecting more via the internet, that's why there's just as few games with local multiplayer(I think).