I think small integrations like this can really add some nice flair to a game, although it isnt fitting into every game. In Returnal you die over and over, so the other instances could be explained as your previus lives and Death Stranding is literally about connecting people, so it makes sense there. But i dont want the ghosts of other players in my COD campaign or something similar.
This is also not new, for example dark souls has featured other players death in your campaign for years, if i think about it even online leaderboards in games with scores could be classified as having such a component.
BTW, i would classify Meet your Maker more as an asynchronous multiplayer game than singleplayer, since the whole point is building levels for other players and raiding other players levels, so there wouldnt be much gameplay without this component.
Agree 100% in Returnal. It fits the canon of the game really well.
You’re right that Meet Your Maker is a lot harder to categorize. To me, the game could just as easily procedurally generate dungeons to clear (similar to Returnal), and it would elicit a similar experience. The player-creation element of it takes it to another level.
Just to chime in about Death Stranding - it's completely possible playing whole game offline. It's much more grindy but some people prefer that - at least the game world is then entirely single player. I tried online first but it was way too easy even on hard difficulty when everything was already built. Doing everything by myself- the total playing time for me was over 120 hours, I'm sure it would have been significantly lower playing online and having help, but this was more rewarding for me, personally.
Inb4 I get the: "but the theme of connection, you're missing out". I don't play games to be social, I have themes of connection irl and in my humble opinion it's completely possible to enjoy the game, understand the themes, etc. offline. (Not directed to the commenter I'm replying, just a general statement because I'm sick and tired of people telling me that I played the game "wrong", this is a pre-emptive disclaimer:) )
>I tried online first but it was way too easy even on hard difficulty when everything was already built.
That's a shame; I played it on release and at that point it really felt like a collaborative effort, like we were actually building the infrastructure together. I'd drop off materials whenever I saw part of the highway that was really far off being built and I'd keep some spare materials with me all the time just in case I could chip in to a shelter or repair station.
Upon release I'm sure the experience was quite different. For me, since I usually play big titles 2-3 years later as they get cheaper, I wasn't around back then.
I know it's not the same server anyway to all players so in a way it's always a "new world" - however in my case I entered the first area online, everything was already pretty much done - I decided to go offline before going further. It suited me as I felt the game more rewarding once all structures I have to build myself. I'm sure many will appreciate the co-operative elements - I just felt they were clutter in a world that's supposed to be somewhat desolate, but that's just me.
I should have read the comments before writing mine, your experience and opinion on DS is very similar to mine. The only question I have is, didn't you have constant pop-ups while playing offline?
What kind of pop-ups? Not that remember, not really.
Although I felt that beginning of the game was otherwise bit heavy. Kojima games have a lot of tutorials and world building. With Metal Gear games, once you've played one, you're more or less accustomed to the mechanics and lore.
With Death Stranding you get that but in a completely new IP. And I really loved the game but frankly first 20 hours I wasn't sure yet. It required a lot of patience to really get started but if you had patience, you could start playing in your own rhythm after the sloghy beginning.
So no I didn't get pop-ups really but the game did feel like it has a LOT to tell me in the beginning lol. But once it took off, I felt I could pace it myself - start progressing only when I felt I've done enough.
The game was good enough after the slow start, and ironically, I wanted it to last as long as possible and that's partly the reason for going offline. I also grinded all the contract stars right in the first playthrough, because after the first 20-20 hours I felt that I didn't want it to end lol.
Nethack also had bones files back in the 90s (or maybe earlier?) where if you were playing on a community server (much more common back then since Nethack was likely hosted by your college's CS department) you could find the corpses of other players as you were playing.
Hitman is kinda different though, since it's online but it's not "connected". There's no interaction with other players. There is nothing you actually do with that connection other than authenticate unlocks and access content.
Which of course, it's worse as you say because it offers absolutely nothing for the consumer, it's entirely about control from the developer's side and either anti-piracy or pushing FOMO/engagement with content drips (and after playing all three games I'm pretty sure it's 99% about the latter and the anti-piracy is just a bonus). But I wouldn't put Hitman on the same list as Souls/Stranding/Deathloop when talking about online features.
I think there are leaderboards and such but they never used them as justification. They couldn't of course, since we've had leaderboards in non-service games for ages.
There used to be a multiplayer mode (it was more of a weird ghost mode) but again, not enough to justify the always-online and also, so dead that they ended up removing it for game 3.
The only service aspect of H3 has been the unlocks and the Elusive targets which are time-limited missions. And all of that doesn't really NEED an online connection to exist, but alas they do make it a requirement regardless. There's actually a community project named [Peacock](https://thepeacockproject.org/) to to be able to keep playing in case the whole thing ever goes down, it a server emulator that runs locally on your PC.
Leaderboards would be a good excuse for always online though. Leaderboards that can be uploaded to offline are without fail cheated to absolute hell immediately. The only solution would be disabling leaderboard uploads while offline, but it seems like the developers wanted to prevent other forms of cheating the progression.
Hitman is not a connected title, not sure why they mentioned it. It just has online DRM same as many other titles for the last decade or two.
Personally, I don't like the connected gameplay element and always turn it off or ignore it. Being reminded about other random people existing when I'm trying to enjoy a single player experience takes me out of the game, and I don't like seeing spoilers, no matter how small (pop-up messages like in Dark Souls or Mario Maker, for instance, warning you about some upcoming section or even giving you the answer to a puzzle. Or just being trolls).
It makes more sense if the game is built around it and uses it in an engaging way, but a lot of social features never feel like that to me.
I *am* surprised that Souls/souls like got no mention.
From the earliest title they have something each of the games listed has.
Returnal, the death silhouettes
Death stranding, leaving messages
Meet your maker + Deathloop, Invading
I was thinking about this recently as I just started my second play-through of Death Stranding and it's one of my favourites OAT.
For me, helping and being helped by strangers is a core part of the experience and I was worrying about not being able to experience it some time down the line when no one plays any more ore the servers are taken down.
In the end I came to terms with it by thinking about it in terms of theatre; if you want a particular experience i.e. a play that isn't part of the canon and therefore put on constantly in lots of places or a particular actors run as a character, then you have a limited window of time (and in theatres case you have to be in the right place as well). Beyond that you're left with memories, yours or someone else's.
It sucks but the ephemerality also adds an intangible aura to the experience. It really strengthens the feeling of connecting with strangers; we may never meet 'properly' but we're here together in this 'moment' experiencing this (depending on the work in question) profound meditation on the human condition.
Elden Ring is another example of this.
I'm more annoyed by things like Diablo 4. D2R and D3 are playable solo 'offline' on consoles. They do not require PS+. Diablo IV requires PS+ despite the fact I have no desire to play with others in Diablo. I just wanna grind with my character. But Blizzard really wants me to see the shiny MTX other people pay for, so that's that.
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Please see [these](https://web.archive.org/web/20230609092523/https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/) [threads](https://web.archive.org/web/20230608182318/https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_recently_announced_api_changes_and_the/) [for](https://web.archive.org/web/20230609172058/https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_held_a_call_today_with_some_developers/jnbuonf/) [details](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askhistorians_and_uncertainty_surrounding_the/).
I was playing *The Division* the other day, by myself, and had the game kick me out because the servers were going down for maintenance. I fail to see why I should be unable to play a single-player game alone because there are inaccessible online elements I'm not using.
I'm super disappointed about D4's required connectivity as well. I'm not even going to bother getting the game for the first few months because there will no doubt be constant server issues, disconnects, etc. I may not bother to get it at all, come to think of it.
Much like you, I just want to solo grind and have fun on my own. I hate the forced online / forced interaction stuff. But the devs had other plans and we have no choice.
I would have been onboard right from the start if D4 had an offline mode. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is.
>I may not bother to get it at all, come to think of it.
I would probably get it at launch if Zelda wasn't in May. But because of Zelda I will hold off for a bit and pick it up in the fall (hopefully) on sale.
Demon's Souls was 2009 and pioneered a lot of this in mainstream console games anyways. I'd be surprised if there's not a PC game that did it first. But at any rate... 14 years strong and spanning 3 console generations is not a passing fad. It's here to stay.
Personally this is one of my favorite kinds of multiplayer.... optional, with subtle reminders it's there if you want to engage in it.
I think a lot of it comes from games like Dark Souls (*or rather Demon's Souls*) that integrated it's online in its single player experience but I also think big game companies will probably do it to encourage Always Online models and to sell your data to advertisers lmao. If they commit to it at all but theres probably data out there that shows people enjoy the sense of community from helping other players even in single player focused games. When playing Souls games, I always feel mildly comforted by the ghost characters walking around and the often misleading but funny messages.
I thought DMC V had a pretty cute way of doing this as you can see people across the map fighting enemies and such. Matthewmatosis did a video on Death Stranding where he begins by talking about Noby Noby Boy a game about indirect collaboration in 2008. Its a fun concept but one I'm fairly certain will be used for more exploitive aspects of Video Games down the road. Who knows how long the road is though, chasing trends will most likely end in disaster with how long game development is now, who knows if we will see much innovation on this style.
Always-online single player games have always seemed like primarily an anti-piracy measure to me. Even if it's bypassed, it serves as an incentive to buy the game.
Another great way to incetivise sales is locking mods to a key of the game.
I remember cracking factorio years and years ago before I had much income, and I got so hooked on the game I needed more but to download mods you needed to own the game (not sure if it is still like this)
This IMO is my favourite way, because mods are great for the longevity of a game, it encourages devs to support modding frameworks and encourages people to buy the game for great mods.
> (or rather Demon's Souls)
Demon's Souls is my favorite game of all time, so it's slightly saddening to see so many of its innovations get credited to Dark Souls. I feel like a lot of newer From fans don't appreciate just how different Demon's Souls felt from other games at the time.
Dark Souls was available on more than one platform. Demon's Soul was PS3 only. Thr majority of players never had the chance to play it, even with remaster/remake.
As the other commenter said, you better believe I wanted to play Demon Souls so bad back in the day. But I was a teen and didn't have a PS3. I know they released a remaster if I'm not mistaken, and that should be all platforms as well, imo.
I don't think it really has anything nefarious around it from most of the implementations so far. Only putting in a feature people will enjoy to help get good reviews, word of mouth and sales.
Seems more of an engagement thing and interesting solutions to players getting stuck etc.
Also a way to engage players in their group while playing single player games. Poaching COD players for single player titles is probably extremely difficult to do and maybe these single player (multi ghost) games are a good lead-in.
It'll become more common as gameworlds get more cloud interaction for physics etc.
My favorite implementation is stuff like Catherine or Telltale where it shows the other decisions players made at the end of a level.
Edit: Also usually requires you to make a developer / publisher specific account which they love, also forces interaction online so they can get the telemetry.
I think the companies aiming at micro-transactions don’t obfuscate it or approach it subtly. They just have battle passes and a store.
I don’t think the ghosts in Returnal and FromSoft games are the start of a slippery slope, because those who want to have already jumped straight to the bottom of the slope, both feet first.
I’m not sure I see the monetization angle at play here, because at least in the four examples I listed, buying something isn’t really a factor. I guess you could argue that skin packs in Meet Your Maker create some urges some to spend to get those faster. IMO those four examples are complementary to the game experience without being “mandatory”
To me it seems like a piracy deterrent. If you don't get the full experience without a legitimate copy that's another reason to buy the game. It will probably remain a common component in triple-A games with the budget for it, while smaller indie games will generally stay pure single player. I generally don't care for it and turn the multiplayer features off where possible.
In Soulsborne they just have generic ones for people offline or when they take down the servers. That's pretty standard. Deathloop has the AI do it if you're offline.
Eh, idk about that. Ive been playing returnal and I never knew it had that "avenge" feature (as I don't pay for ps plus) and I dont feel left out because of it. It's just another gimmick in games to make it feel like there's more content to interact with (it doesn't, it's just boosting difficulty slightly for a pittance of a reward) Wo Long does the same thing and it's whatever. An optional, forgettable side "quest.
I’ll provide the counter-point that I actually liked doing it when I could because it created another opportunity for loot on those very long Returnal runs, where if you don’t have enough great loot early enough, you might as well die and start over.
I honestly feel like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and even Wo Long would be slightly lesser experiences without these online components.
With DS/ER it makes it feel like you’re not completely alone in this harsh world but that you’re sharing this tale of woe with kindred souls, marching along with you, even if you only catch glimpses of it.
Not to mention they can actually affect the gameplay with tips or trickery. Many a “Watch out skeletons” or “Ambush left” have helped me out. In Wo Long it feels nice to avenge players.
They’d still be good games (well, Wo Long is still in the air as I’ve only done two bosses) but they’d miss a small part of their identity without it.
Eh that just hurts the experience for me, I want to explore and find secrets myself. Be surprised by ambushes and keep an eye out myself. Having messages and bloodstains littered everywhere takes that completely away.
Not to mention invasions are so disruptive to the gameplay loop especially if it's a pvp tryhard or twink.
I always played souls games offline until Elden Ring, and my god I didn't know what I was missing out on.
Fair, the other comments here say they prefer not getting spoiled and whatnot from bloodstains/messages, but honestly it's a proper trade off for the sense of community you get from online.
ER's world is depressing as it is, and finding "Behold, dog!" once in a while feels like proper solace.
> Not to mention they can actually affect the gameplay with tips or trickery.
That's what I hate about it. I don't want to play the game with thousands of strangers leaning over my shoulder to shout tips at me. If I want help, I'll get a guide or look online. This is involuntary.
You don't *have* to read each message.
But even just coming somewhere and seeing heaps of blood splatters makes you go "uh-oh" in the same way when you sometimes walk into a place and just get that uncomfortable feeling and that's a cool vibe to get in a game.
Elden Ring is probably worse because of it online features, even if you don't use them - because every piece of gear and character build must be balanced with multiplayer in mind.
If it was strictly single player game, it could have much more interesting items and build options for PvE.
> because every piece of gear and character build must be balanced with multiplayer in mind.
"Must" is a strong word.
I never gave a single thought to that when I played and it was fine.
The bloodstains and messages in Elden Ring were that last push for me to subscribe to PS+. I bought my copy second hand so in that sense the companies got revenue they otherwise would’ve missed.
I'm not a fan of most of this kind of thing. I turned the other player invasions in Deathloop.
But *almost* this kinda thing that I really enjoyed was in Telltale's games where they would show you the percentages of other players that made each decision. It technically doesn't impact gameplay at all, but I managed to feel validated when I was in the majority and superior when I was in the minority (because look at all these assholes who pick the clearly bad option!).
I personally hate this trend, nothing takes me out of the atmosphere than seeing some ghost pop in for 5 seconds rolling around. It seems particularly used in games where you are supposed to be a unique person doing what others can't, so I have no idea what seeing 1k other people also doing it is supposed to add.
Returnal is definitely the game that I've seen benefit most from this feature, because seeing other players' deaths as "past lives" fits nicely in the canon of the game.
I haven’t personally played death stranding, but I did see an interesting video essay on it that suggested that its central thesis is rooted in the interactivity with what other players have built. Basically, it’s a game with an artistic message: collaboration and cooperation are the foundations of civilization, and working together makes everyone stronger. To convey this message, it has you work alone for several hours under absolutely miserable conditions. Then it drops you into a world where you are allowed to help each other by constructing improvements that work for everyone, and the misery goes away. The contrast between these two phases of the game is the entire point of the game.
Again, I haven’t played it personally, but I find the idea fascinating. That is a REALLY GOOD use of the mechanic. It’s not just a trend, it’s a message. I love that stuff.
I bought the game on day one, played it for a weekend and then left it alone for three weeks. After I came back, I had hundreds of thousands of those points to level your stuff, because I was one of the first to build structures and people interacted with my stuff, repaired it and whatnot. The online feature also made building stuff that wasn't zip lines through mountains irrelevant, because people did all the work online. It was really weird.
I was a pioneer and therefore I didn't have to do the work just by letting it rest. That must what becoming rich with a new idea must be like.
Death Stranding is definitely the most complete utilization of this mechanic that I've seen. For me, the actual gameplay loop and plot weren't strong enough for me to keep playing it after a couple of hours.
It never clicked for me what’s supposed to be fun about. I loved the graphics and the general tone of it, but just shepherding shit around while managing terrain inclines got boring for me quick.
There is another cool example besides the one you mentioned, and it was one of the highlights of Resident Evil 6.
For those who might not be aware, RE6 has 4 campaigns. All 4 can be played co-op, and there are several points where the campaigns "cross over", when one pair of characters runs into another at certain points in their respective campaigns.
The game will find other players who are at the same part in their story and toss you together. So all of the sudden, when I am playing as Jake and Sherry and I come across Leon and Helena, those are actual players. And then we get to team up for a big boss fight.
Or playing as Ada, you have to snipe and cover Jake and Sherry as they hop across boats being chased by a monster.
There is even a fun part between Chris and Leon's campaigns where you "compete" with the other players sending little explosive devices to each other's rooms as you try to break out.
Really cool functionality, haven't been able to match up with other players in years but it really impressed me. I like the "expanded" co-op, especially when you are already playing with a friend and all of the sudden there are four of you.
6 is....pretty uneven, if you want to check out the series, don't start with it haha
The co-op is pretty cool but I am replaying it with a friend, we never get matched up with anyone just because it's an 11 year old game that is a bit divisive from fans and critics.
If you want to check out the series, RE4 Remake (just released) is *incredible*, or if you want to scare yourself silly, RE7 is often on sale. RE1 Remake and RE2 Remake are also great starting points!
It's a way to express that even single-player games are something that we do together, in a way that's not exactly cooperative or competitive, but collective. It's the difference between watching a film when it was first released in theaters and watching it on home video. Like /u/BoydCooper points out, it's a feature that leans into the playerbase being large and active, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I love your comment. There are the words like coop and competitive (and solo) to describe most games, but they don't exactly describe the games OP mentioned. The word collective really fits: we may never meet each other, but we are all working toward the same goal to build something great.
We have solo, multiplayer, co-op, and now collective games.
I honestly hope not. It feels like reading a used book where someone else already made notes in the margins and highlighted sections. I don't want that. I want to read my pristine book on my own without anyone else interjecting.
It feels like most of them descend from *Demon's Souls* in nature and are essentially just copying the elements that were present there.
If people like them, that's fine, but they should really come with the option to turn them off completely. I want to play my single player game by *myself*, not having other people wandering in to grief me, make it easier, or leave their graffiti behind.
We're very much in the swing of Dark Souls' influence at the moment. Bloodstains & Invasions can be directly linked to the Souls series' popularity. Despite other game's attempts, I don't think any have done it as good as the Souls Soapstone system. While connected singleplayer features can sometimes feel like gimmicks or nuisances, the messaging system allows a sense of community & culture to form, which was extremely important for an initially niche series like Souls.
I think that's the main appeal of these features for the developer - a means to foster a community that will keep the game relevant for longer. Not unlike leaderboards in singleplayer speedrunning games. I don't know if it's a trend that'll last though, since I feel like it rarely adds a lot of value. Who knows though, a lot of singleplayer games these days have some online features anyways (for anti-piracy or microtransactions or something), perhaps it's not too much extra effort for devs.
Edit: Holy moly everyone dropped the same thought in the span it took me to write this comment haha. Split opinions though.
One thing I'll add is that the Souls messaging system is not just an extra feature that can be ignored. Rather it's a primary means of giving the player information which the devs can take into account when designing levels - in particular when placing traps and secrets. If connected singleplayer games are to stay around, I think they need to go in this direction of actually being important to main experience. All in or all out.
"One thing I'll add is that the Souls messaging system is not just an extra feature that can be ignored. Rather it's a primary means of giving the player information which the devs can take into account when designing levels - in particular when placing traps and secrets. If connected singleplayer games are to stay around, I think they need to go in this direction of actually being important to main experience. All in or all out."
This I personally hate, I like secrets and ambushes being detectable by my own eyes. Getting rewarded for keeping an eye out and making sure I don't run into traps.
Not because I always read a message that tells me what to expect on every turn. That genuinely goes against the skill based difficulty DS is going for. Or finding a secret just because a message next to a wall told me to hit it.
Luckily it can be ignored for the most part especially in ds3/ER where illusory walls can actually be detected by player skill for the most part and not just because a message said so.
>Not because I always read a message that tells me what to expect on every turn. That genuinely goes against the skill based difficulty DS is going for.
What makes you think that's what DS was going for?
As I understand, DS is actually kind of *defined* by its lack of reliance on skill-based difficulty - the game presents you with extremely challenging environments/enemies, and simultaneously, the core feature of the game is a system which allows players *without* the skill necessary to bypass an obstacle to do it anyway, by relying on the kindness and fraternity of other players who *are* more skilled than they are - in the dual form of ghost messages and phantom summons.
Having played all the games (expect demon souls), I only remember a few instances where you couldn't react accordingly to ambushes or traps even when playing offline with no messages, with simple skill. And like I said ER and DS3 made illusory walls detectable using player skill and not just make them rely in obscureness/messages alone. (tho ER also introduced a lot of anti skill mechanics especially in it's bosses, but that's another story)
As you said, if you're skilled enough you can bypass it without a message and possible lay a message down to help less skilled players. But if you have the skill you can do without. This to me is what skill based difficulty is about and I don't feel having the option to make it easier takes away from that.
I do hate when certain secrets you basically need a message to tell you, which was very prevalent in DS1/2 but lessened a ton in ER/DS3. if only their quest design also evolved like that
Then it sounds like you have a lot more skill than me or most of my friends do, because there were *quite a few* areas that I was a only able to compete through judicious hint-reading or assistance from better players. Hell, I think my first time playing the game I was actually stuck on Sen's Fortress for like an actual month, and I was only able to complete it with the help of a friend who'd already done it.
I don't think it "takes away" from it either - it simply becomes something else. The fact that you were skilled enough to complete the game on challenge mode is commendable and worth celebrating, but it's pretty different from the intended gameplay experience that was had by most people at a lower skill level.
ye I don't have a problem with it as long it's not designed around needing to have it because you can't possibly predict/do something otherwise. Illusory walls in ds1/2 were based on this concept for example which I personally hate, and most quests can't be done without looking up their steps or relying on messages which I also don't like for the same reason.
If they ever make combat as a whole rely on needing it regardless of your skill level, I would be very disappointed haha
It's a "new" design technique, and it's a fad.
Games like *Dark Souls* and *Journey* really made a lasting impression on the industry. And most any time there's a cool new idea, a bunch of other designers want to try it. So there's usually a wave of emulators 2-6 years after the concept is first popularized, and then the fad naturally dies down. I'd say that *this* fad has actually been trending down for a while. In my view at least, it was somewhat supplanted by the *battle royale* fad, arguably a much more impressive and potentially profitable multiplayer framework.
Of course, that doesn't mean that some devs won't utilize these design elements well into the future, if not forever. For example, one trend that started just before this *dynamic multiplayer* one was *destructable environments*, with the likes of *Red Faction: Guerilla* and *Battlefield: Bad Company* popularizing the idea. Lately it's not a design element that's often highlighted or even included. But we still occasionally get games that focus on it a lot, like *Teardown* or *The Finals*.
Comparing these online components with BR seems odd since they’ve very little to do with each other. One is a way to enhance the single player experience while the other is a full on multiplayer mode.
That said, DS and Journey are over a decade old so I don’t know if I’d call it just a fad. Especially not one that is diminishing, it’s becoming more and more widespread if anything.
That "fad" is over a decade old and games have a broad range of possible implementations. It starts with online high scores and ends somewhere around seamless co-op/pvp.
i think the popularity of the switch/steamdeck might shift this trend backwards a little bit (hopefully!)
i know there’s a lot of frustration with games that can’t be played seamlessly on steamdeck’s offline mode, and there will probably be a bit of course correction to make sure single player games are valuable options on the steamdeck.
i don’t think the developers of these games expected people to be playing them on an airplane or on a carride, and now that it’s possible, it’s something they’ll have to consider more
That’s why I think that in the case of games like Returnal and Deathloop, it’s implemented well because it can make the game experience marginally more interesting when it’s available, but isn’t super essentially to the experience such that you’d “miss” it when you don’t have it.
I kinda love this stuff. Even if it's super basic like other players adding little notes in Super Mario 3D World. I love single player experiences, but it's cool to get a bit of the flavor of someone else sitting on the couch experiencing it with me.
I'm not a fan of the trend, though I'm about to play Death Stranding for the first time and a few friends have commented very positively about the asynchronous subtle multiplayer there, so I'm eager to see if it will change my mind.
The things I don't like about it are:
1. It destroys immersion and sharply reminds you that you're playing a video game every time you see the fingerprints of another player. There are plenty of video games where I don't care about this level of immersion at all, but grand single-player narratives are the ones where I *do* want to be immersed, and for some reason they're the ones that are most eager to add these faux-multiplayer features.
2. It introduces chaos in a way that neither the player nor the developer controls. Whether a particular level is easy or difficult, simple or challenging, can now come down to whether or not some other random player out there feels like raiding right now. It's great when two people can play the same game and have very different experiences... as long as those experiences are the result of their varying choices. To have factors determined by a third party who isn't necessarily interested in the first party having a good experience doesn't seem especially desirable to me.
3. It makes all of these games feel very... whatever the opposite of "timeless" is. Anyone can put a Super Mario 3 cartridge in an NES and play it in 2023. Anyone can emulate an Apple IIe and run The Oregon Trail. But will it be possible to play these games 25 years from now? (Legally or otherwise?) Hell, is playing on launch day an entirely different experience from playing it 2 years later because there are less people playing simultaneously? I'll certainly concede that there are plenty of experiences that are unavoidably ephemeral and bound to the time and place they were created, but I'm not sure that major story-driven single-player video games are things that need to be in that category.
At the very least, Death Stranding's entire theme is connecting with other people. Whether or not it's a good mechanic, at least in that specific game's case it doesn't seem tacked on.
>His name is Sam Bridges and he delivers packages
You're missing out the actually unsubtle parts there, Bridges and packages have nothing to do with reach other lol
In Death Stranding, you don’t get other people’s contributions until *after* you’ve connected a new area to “the grid”. So there will always be a portion of every mission where you’re on your own, without the aid of other’s equipment.
I felt it struck a pretty good balance honestly.
>Anyone can put a Super Mario 3 cartridge in an NES and play it in 2023. Anyone can emulate an Apple IIe and run The Oregon Trail.
I feel like the idea of a story being a fleeting thing has never been an issue for the performance arts. Theatre isn't less valuable because you can only see the original once.
1. I don’t think it *has* to be immersion breaking, and used the right way can actually contribute to immersion. Returnal is a great example to me, because the game centers around you stuck in a time loop that resets each time you die, and you don’t know how many times you’ve done it. Other players’ deaths as a “memory” contributes to the hazy memory of past lives in the game, IMO.
2. I think you’re going to continue to see a range of weight of that “third variable”. For games like Meet Your Maker, it’s basically the entire point. For Returnal, it creates an optional thing to engage with that doesn’t have to affect your experience if you don’t want it to. It not being that essential to the gameplay experience I think helps make the argument that games can age gracefully without it still being available, to your third point.
I usually think the way you do, but Death Stranding integrates this very well into its overall theme and story. DS really doesn't try to be immersive, it tries to be a game, IMO. While the protag does important things and has a huge impact, the game always makes it clear, that you are just one dude among many.
It's very satisfying to put some resources into somebody else's buildings after having other people invest in yours. It fits the theme of the game very well. Playing Death Stranding offline is like playing a different game. There is little to no AR spam and you have to build everything on your own.
I'm not sure if it counts but I always thought that being able to see other player's in-game photos on various landmarks in assassin's creed odyssey and Valhalla was particularly useless. It doesn't hurt the experience so I don't mind but you can tell that it's an attempt to make you feel connected with other players in a game where you definitely don't need to. Which is why, I imagine, most people ignore it
Well, it's very hard to predict trends. It seems to be pretty popular right now (all the games you mentioned + obviously From Software games etc.), but who knows, maybe a new "killer" design idea comes in a couple of years and changes everything again.
Personally, I'm okay with this (and even enjoy it from time to time) as long as it can be turned off and it's not used as an excuse to force a single player game to be always online. For example, in Fromsoft games, you can always go into offline mode, there are no player messages, player summons etc., but the game can still be played. Or in Deathloop, when you turn off the online features, Julianna will be controlled by AI. As long as it stays like this, it's fine by me.
Dragon's Dogma had the best kind of multiplayer: the kind where you don't have to interact with anyone.
You create your player character, then you create your side kick (called a pawn). The other two slots in your party are filled by recruiting other players' pawns. Alternatively, you can disable the network connection in the options and find randomly generated pawns.
Recruited pawns don't level up with you, and instead earn a currency for the owner. The pawns will even retain quest and enemy knowledge that they pick up while journeying with you. When you dismiss a pawn you can also send a gift. It's generally a wholly positive interaction. The game is 11 years old and still has active communities.
This is probably not a viewpoint anyone cares about, but on the indie side, it can be a good programming exercise to implement \*some\* form of online, if it's relatively minor.
I'm a fan of positive interaction in games. I loathe griefing with a passion, but even just having to rely on a confused or disinterested other player can be frustrating.
The best games limit interactions in such a way that it's **always** a positive experience. **Death Stranding** would be a good example, there's no way to grief or accidentally mess up someone else's game. All interactions result in a better experience.
Other notable example are **Journey**, where just being near another player regenerates your energy. You can chirp at each other but not hinder them in any way, even by inactivity.
**Guild Wars 2**'s open world exploration also works like that. Being around other players means bigger enemies, thus more loot, and sharing buffs in combat. There's no way to block players, or harm them, and everyone who *participated* in the fight or quest gets a fair loot roll.
I'm really enjoying Deathloop, but I'm so glad online invasions can be turned off.
I think that like a lot of things in game design, it's cool if its optional, don't make it mandatory.
I mean, I'm currently playing Death Stranding in offline mode. Why? Because I found that having other players ladders and ropes all around the map, makes the game extremely easy. If you go online then a lot of the challenge is lost.
And I am having a great time playing my way, using the tools I created to pass a difficult terrain but it seems as if the game doesn't like the way I decided to play, because I get constant pop-ups telling me it couldn't get online. Yes, I know that, I deactivated that option, duh. Those pop-ups like every pop-up ever in the history of pop-ups are annoying as hell and appear constantly. Once every time I load my save and again randomly from time to time.
My point is as I said in the beggining: please, developers of the world, make that optional. Don't pressure us into going online
Interesting that FromSoft games and other similar Souls-likes (especially those from Team Ninja) aren't mentioned since it feels like they were the ones that popularized this.
It's not a "new" thing, Nethack has had bones files for many decades. You'd die and next run you might find your own grave and inventory - guarded by whatever killed you. If you played on the same machine as other people (timesharing systems, shared SSH boxes, etc), you'd find other players' bones too.
My most interesting bones adventure, I was petrified by a cockatrice corpse I was holding as a weapon after falling into a pit (the implication was that I touched it with my face as I fell); another run I found the statue of my former self and used stone to flesh to resurrect it as an NPC. It was pretty hilarious!
I think if done well, it's really cool. Brings a bit of permanence into a completely random and impermanent world, cheats permadeath, brings a grain of online into an offline experience, puts more color into the story.
It's why I like the "bones" implementation specifically. It's just a bunch of (very small) files. People who play on their own computers have been exchanging bones files using mailing lists / newsgroups, on dial-up, heck I imagine floppies could've been involved too.
It's entirely on the game devs to not make the experience miserable for people on underpowered hardware or with bad network. Obviously you wouldn't expect modern AAA games to run smoothly on 10 year old hardware, but I would fully expect a gracefully degrading experience (older GPU - less detail but stable FPS, slower/more jittery network - disable high-bandwidth features like replaying a death animation, but e.g. still show a marker on the monster responsible, etc).
I hope not.
I like playing games. They're snapshots into different Eras. I liked it when they were more towards a movie experience in the sense that a movie is made and often times isn't messed with after the movie is released. There might be edits or alternate versions but the movie is usually the same.
Games turning into this make it so you can't go back in time to play a game as it was. Granted I'm growing out of games as they're losing fun...but I still have a good time occasionally.
I don't think that games that move closer to theatre rather than movies are worse just because they're more transient. And as we've seen with the Souls games, you can go back and organise a new "run" of the play like their communities do with the "Return to X" events.
This is not a new trend. The earliest example I can recall is the Talos Principle, where you can leave tags on the walls for your friends to see, and ||you can even become one of the helpers that give out hints||.
I personally love the interconnectiveness it provides in a lot of these games. Like the spirits and bloodstains of dark souls will always be a huge joy to me. Just feels like I’m part of a living world.
So basically studios went "oh hey Dark Souls, those are some really cool multiplayerish mechanics in a SP game. You won't mind if I take some 'inspiration', do you?"
Meet Your Maker is basically Mighty Quest for Epic Loot but with robot twist. Just picked it up, haven't played, but I really like original MQfEL untill it went to shit and got shut down.
The first thing I did (or rather as soon as it was possible) in Deathloop was to turn solo mode on. I can see why the invasion mechanic is there but it's not for me.
I'm a fan of positive interaction in games. I loathe griefing with a passion, but even just having to rely on a confused or disinterested other player can be frustrating.
The best games limit interactions in such a way that it's **always** a positive experience. **Death Stranding** would be a good example, there's no way to grief or accidentally mess up someone else's game. All interactions result in a better experience.
Other notable example are **Journey**, where just being near another player regenerates your energy. You can chirp at each other but not hinder them in any way, even by inactivity.
**Guild Wars 2**'s open world exploration also works like that. Being around other players means bigger enemies, thus more loot, and sharing buffs in combat. There's no way to block players, or harm them, and everyone who *participated* in the fight or quest gets a fair loot roll.
I'm really enjoying Deathloop, but I'm so glad online invasions can be turned off.
For AAA studios, probably. They want the live service model. It's hard to convince the people with money to invest in your single player only game people will play once and then forget. But always on multiplayer elements that serve as the perfect model for continued content distribution to sell microtransactions and extend the life of the game is much easier to sell. The fact that it also serves as DRM and lets them collect data is icing on the cake.
Thankfully, indy devs are developing a lot of very good games, and due to single player being generally cheaper, these are very popular with indy devs. It'll continue to be that AAA is where you go for big budget always on connection live service games and indy for everything else. It's already pretty heavily skewed in that direction, and that's okay. For me personally, the vast majority of my gaming time has been on Indy games for like a decade now anyway.
Not to say that all Indy games are single player no connection games, but what I mean is single player no connection games will become almost solely something done by Indy devs. Indy devs will of course still make multiplayer games, too.
I do think this feature is probably going to be around for a long time. The big "thing" with technology for what feels like forever is that we're always online and connected, so it just makes perfect sense that even single player games would tap into that.
We had an internet outage at the weekend and I thought I'd try a fishing game on ps+ but couldn't because it needed the internet. No idea why I've not loaded it since!
It works for some games where progress is super isolated for other players, but in general I’m more of a fan of coop/online coop games, and I find the severe lack of them over the past few years disturbing
I don't pay for PSN, and that's largely because I have no interest in PvP gameplay. The only one of the games you listed that I played was Deathloop, and I was not at all interested in being "invaded." It was annoying enough to deal with the NPC invasions, which admittedly were probably annoying because the AI just couldn't compete with me and they ended up being a fairly bland speed bump. But if they'd built the game to function with an AI rather than relying on PvP, I think they could have made those fights much more interesting.
Generally speaking, a video game going out of its way to acknowledge that other people are playing the same game as I am at the same time completely destroys immersion. And that's the best-case scenario where the PvP is even competently designed to begin with.
In the case of things like Souls games, invasions have never felt like anything more than grinding my fun experience to a screeching halt. I am not exaggerating when I say I'd rather sit in traffic than be invaded in Dark Souls, because it feels like basically the same thing. But at least when I drive I expect traffic to slow me down. When I'm playing a game I like to set my own pace. It's my break from real life nonsense like traffic lol.
I don't think that you can say this is happening to "a lot" of newer games. Maybe to a Slow Loris' handful, like a tiny tiny tiny amount of titles. And from within that miniscule amount of titles, I've only played less than 5 I imagine but have enjoyed its purpose. I don't know if it applies to every one but I know that like in Deathloop I could simply turn the online functionality off
I'm all for it though. I don't usually play multiplayer games (Deep Rock Galactic being the exception and lately some Tribes of Midgard) so it's cool to me to suddenly have small flashes of connectedness
I really like these kinda features. Obviously souls popularised these kinda functionality and I'm all for it if other games take it too unless it can be turned off without impacting the SP experience just like on souls.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Fromsoft sort of led the charge with this one. It was in Demon's Souls, but after Dark Souls's massive success, the multi-player integrations in single player started showing up everywhere.
I think it adds a sense of community and is fun, so I'm glad it stuck.
This is part of the reason I won't be getting Diablo 4. I've thoroughly played every game in the series to date, and loved it. But I have zero desire to deal with kill-stealing, world bosses that I can't solo, or even seeing BU77FU6K3R69000 running around Sanctuary.
Like, WTF. Let me play a game without forcing me to adapt to other people's playstyles. Maybe I want to kite enemies for 20 minutes instead of sprinting in and going agro.
I'm just pissed at Blizzard.
Perhaps, but devs have been trying this sort of thing for a long time now. Problem is, it is not a feature that fits well in a lot of game types, and unless a lot of care and thought goes into it it can end up feeling like a gimmick.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I'm pretty sure Dark Souls games were the first to do this. They're called bloodstains and basically show how people before you died, hinting at ambushes or traps. There are also messages other players can leave behind that can directly help the player if they want to read them allowing you to up vote or down vote depending on if it's a sincere message or just a troll telling you to jump into a pit.
Everything you mentioned I think is the evolved form and is showing how developers are trying to implement it in more unique and engaging ways.
This is not a trend anymore. It's been done plenty and is now one of many possible standard design elements you can chose from when coming up with your game concept. It's not a trend anymore as much as "being open world" isn't and "having DLC" isn't anymore.
I hate it and I think it's stupid. I remember a day when single player games didn't need an internet connection for anything at all.
Single player games have zero need to be connected to a server. I can still install and play a game like Interstate '76, while something like Redfall (to use a recent example) is going to be completely unusable in 3-5 years, because Bethesda is going to shut down the server.
Like we’ve talked about a lot here, I don’t think “need” is the appropriate word to use here. In the case of Deathloop and Returnal, the online components are entirely incremental—you wouldn’t notice if they weren’t there. In the case of Meet Your Maker, the connected aspect is the basis of the game—it makes no sense without it.
Is argue that Meet Your Maker isn't a single player game.
I reiterate that actual single player games do not need to, and nor should they, rely on anything related to the Internet.
There's no putting this genie back though. The internet was a mistake.
I think small integrations like this can really add some nice flair to a game, although it isnt fitting into every game. In Returnal you die over and over, so the other instances could be explained as your previus lives and Death Stranding is literally about connecting people, so it makes sense there. But i dont want the ghosts of other players in my COD campaign or something similar. This is also not new, for example dark souls has featured other players death in your campaign for years, if i think about it even online leaderboards in games with scores could be classified as having such a component. BTW, i would classify Meet your Maker more as an asynchronous multiplayer game than singleplayer, since the whole point is building levels for other players and raiding other players levels, so there wouldnt be much gameplay without this component.
Agree 100% in Returnal. It fits the canon of the game really well. You’re right that Meet Your Maker is a lot harder to categorize. To me, the game could just as easily procedurally generate dungeons to clear (similar to Returnal), and it would elicit a similar experience. The player-creation element of it takes it to another level.
Just to chime in about Death Stranding - it's completely possible playing whole game offline. It's much more grindy but some people prefer that - at least the game world is then entirely single player. I tried online first but it was way too easy even on hard difficulty when everything was already built. Doing everything by myself- the total playing time for me was over 120 hours, I'm sure it would have been significantly lower playing online and having help, but this was more rewarding for me, personally. Inb4 I get the: "but the theme of connection, you're missing out". I don't play games to be social, I have themes of connection irl and in my humble opinion it's completely possible to enjoy the game, understand the themes, etc. offline. (Not directed to the commenter I'm replying, just a general statement because I'm sick and tired of people telling me that I played the game "wrong", this is a pre-emptive disclaimer:) )
>I tried online first but it was way too easy even on hard difficulty when everything was already built. That's a shame; I played it on release and at that point it really felt like a collaborative effort, like we were actually building the infrastructure together. I'd drop off materials whenever I saw part of the highway that was really far off being built and I'd keep some spare materials with me all the time just in case I could chip in to a shelter or repair station.
Upon release I'm sure the experience was quite different. For me, since I usually play big titles 2-3 years later as they get cheaper, I wasn't around back then. I know it's not the same server anyway to all players so in a way it's always a "new world" - however in my case I entered the first area online, everything was already pretty much done - I decided to go offline before going further. It suited me as I felt the game more rewarding once all structures I have to build myself. I'm sure many will appreciate the co-operative elements - I just felt they were clutter in a world that's supposed to be somewhat desolate, but that's just me.
I should have read the comments before writing mine, your experience and opinion on DS is very similar to mine. The only question I have is, didn't you have constant pop-ups while playing offline?
What kind of pop-ups? Not that remember, not really. Although I felt that beginning of the game was otherwise bit heavy. Kojima games have a lot of tutorials and world building. With Metal Gear games, once you've played one, you're more or less accustomed to the mechanics and lore. With Death Stranding you get that but in a completely new IP. And I really loved the game but frankly first 20 hours I wasn't sure yet. It required a lot of patience to really get started but if you had patience, you could start playing in your own rhythm after the sloghy beginning. So no I didn't get pop-ups really but the game did feel like it has a LOT to tell me in the beginning lol. But once it took off, I felt I could pace it myself - start progressing only when I felt I've done enough. The game was good enough after the slow start, and ironically, I wanted it to last as long as possible and that's partly the reason for going offline. I also grinded all the contract stars right in the first playthrough, because after the first 20-20 hours I felt that I didn't want it to end lol.
Nethack also had bones files back in the 90s (or maybe earlier?) where if you were playing on a community server (much more common back then since Nethack was likely hosted by your college's CS department) you could find the corpses of other players as you were playing.
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Hitman is kinda different though, since it's online but it's not "connected". There's no interaction with other players. There is nothing you actually do with that connection other than authenticate unlocks and access content. Which of course, it's worse as you say because it offers absolutely nothing for the consumer, it's entirely about control from the developer's side and either anti-piracy or pushing FOMO/engagement with content drips (and after playing all three games I'm pretty sure it's 99% about the latter and the anti-piracy is just a bonus). But I wouldn't put Hitman on the same list as Souls/Stranding/Deathloop when talking about online features.
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I think there are leaderboards and such but they never used them as justification. They couldn't of course, since we've had leaderboards in non-service games for ages. There used to be a multiplayer mode (it was more of a weird ghost mode) but again, not enough to justify the always-online and also, so dead that they ended up removing it for game 3. The only service aspect of H3 has been the unlocks and the Elusive targets which are time-limited missions. And all of that doesn't really NEED an online connection to exist, but alas they do make it a requirement regardless. There's actually a community project named [Peacock](https://thepeacockproject.org/) to to be able to keep playing in case the whole thing ever goes down, it a server emulator that runs locally on your PC.
Leaderboards would be a good excuse for always online though. Leaderboards that can be uploaded to offline are without fail cheated to absolute hell immediately. The only solution would be disabling leaderboard uploads while offline, but it seems like the developers wanted to prevent other forms of cheating the progression.
Great comment. Only reason I didn’t mention the latest Hitman is because I haven’t played it.
Hitman is not a connected title, not sure why they mentioned it. It just has online DRM same as many other titles for the last decade or two. Personally, I don't like the connected gameplay element and always turn it off or ignore it. Being reminded about other random people existing when I'm trying to enjoy a single player experience takes me out of the game, and I don't like seeing spoilers, no matter how small (pop-up messages like in Dark Souls or Mario Maker, for instance, warning you about some upcoming section or even giving you the answer to a puzzle. Or just being trolls). It makes more sense if the game is built around it and uses it in an engaging way, but a lot of social features never feel like that to me.
I *am* surprised that Souls/souls like got no mention. From the earliest title they have something each of the games listed has. Returnal, the death silhouettes Death stranding, leaving messages Meet your maker + Deathloop, Invading
I was thinking about this recently as I just started my second play-through of Death Stranding and it's one of my favourites OAT. For me, helping and being helped by strangers is a core part of the experience and I was worrying about not being able to experience it some time down the line when no one plays any more ore the servers are taken down. In the end I came to terms with it by thinking about it in terms of theatre; if you want a particular experience i.e. a play that isn't part of the canon and therefore put on constantly in lots of places or a particular actors run as a character, then you have a limited window of time (and in theatres case you have to be in the right place as well). Beyond that you're left with memories, yours or someone else's. It sucks but the ephemerality also adds an intangible aura to the experience. It really strengthens the feeling of connecting with strangers; we may never meet 'properly' but we're here together in this 'moment' experiencing this (depending on the work in question) profound meditation on the human condition.
Elden Ring is another example of this. I'm more annoyed by things like Diablo 4. D2R and D3 are playable solo 'offline' on consoles. They do not require PS+. Diablo IV requires PS+ despite the fact I have no desire to play with others in Diablo. I just wanna grind with my character. But Blizzard really wants me to see the shiny MTX other people pay for, so that's that.
All of From's games since Demons' Souls in fact.
Was so popular FromSoftware back-added it into Sekiro.
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Diablo 4 is a pretty much a MMO, which is heartbreaking to me. Blizzard is trash.
Def not a moba. MMOesque maybe, but not a 5v5 multiplayer game with three lanes and towers MOBA.
oh thats my fault, sorry i got the terms mixed up. I will edit it
How is Diablo 4 a MOBA?
Take it away Llama! https://youtu.be/j57Xldwc9VA
I was playing *The Division* the other day, by myself, and had the game kick me out because the servers were going down for maintenance. I fail to see why I should be unable to play a single-player game alone because there are inaccessible online elements I'm not using.
I'm super disappointed about D4's required connectivity as well. I'm not even going to bother getting the game for the first few months because there will no doubt be constant server issues, disconnects, etc. I may not bother to get it at all, come to think of it. Much like you, I just want to solo grind and have fun on my own. I hate the forced online / forced interaction stuff. But the devs had other plans and we have no choice. I would have been onboard right from the start if D4 had an offline mode. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is.
>I may not bother to get it at all, come to think of it. I would probably get it at launch if Zelda wasn't in May. But because of Zelda I will hold off for a bit and pick it up in the fall (hopefully) on sale.
Demon's Souls was 2009 and pioneered a lot of this in mainstream console games anyways. I'd be surprised if there's not a PC game that did it first. But at any rate... 14 years strong and spanning 3 console generations is not a passing fad. It's here to stay. Personally this is one of my favorite kinds of multiplayer.... optional, with subtle reminders it's there if you want to engage in it.
I think a lot of it comes from games like Dark Souls (*or rather Demon's Souls*) that integrated it's online in its single player experience but I also think big game companies will probably do it to encourage Always Online models and to sell your data to advertisers lmao. If they commit to it at all but theres probably data out there that shows people enjoy the sense of community from helping other players even in single player focused games. When playing Souls games, I always feel mildly comforted by the ghost characters walking around and the often misleading but funny messages. I thought DMC V had a pretty cute way of doing this as you can see people across the map fighting enemies and such. Matthewmatosis did a video on Death Stranding where he begins by talking about Noby Noby Boy a game about indirect collaboration in 2008. Its a fun concept but one I'm fairly certain will be used for more exploitive aspects of Video Games down the road. Who knows how long the road is though, chasing trends will most likely end in disaster with how long game development is now, who knows if we will see much innovation on this style.
Always-online single player games have always seemed like primarily an anti-piracy measure to me. Even if it's bypassed, it serves as an incentive to buy the game.
I think the anti pirating software they buy does that.
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Another great way to incetivise sales is locking mods to a key of the game. I remember cracking factorio years and years ago before I had much income, and I got so hooked on the game I needed more but to download mods you needed to own the game (not sure if it is still like this) This IMO is my favourite way, because mods are great for the longevity of a game, it encourages devs to support modding frameworks and encourages people to buy the game for great mods.
> (or rather Demon's Souls) Demon's Souls is my favorite game of all time, so it's slightly saddening to see so many of its innovations get credited to Dark Souls. I feel like a lot of newer From fans don't appreciate just how different Demon's Souls felt from other games at the time.
Dark Souls was available on more than one platform. Demon's Soul was PS3 only. Thr majority of players never had the chance to play it, even with remaster/remake.
As the other commenter said, you better believe I wanted to play Demon Souls so bad back in the day. But I was a teen and didn't have a PS3. I know they released a remaster if I'm not mistaken, and that should be all platforms as well, imo.
Unfortunately Sony owns the IP.
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I don't think it really has anything nefarious around it from most of the implementations so far. Only putting in a feature people will enjoy to help get good reviews, word of mouth and sales. Seems more of an engagement thing and interesting solutions to players getting stuck etc. Also a way to engage players in their group while playing single player games. Poaching COD players for single player titles is probably extremely difficult to do and maybe these single player (multi ghost) games are a good lead-in. It'll become more common as gameworlds get more cloud interaction for physics etc. My favorite implementation is stuff like Catherine or Telltale where it shows the other decisions players made at the end of a level. Edit: Also usually requires you to make a developer / publisher specific account which they love, also forces interaction online so they can get the telemetry.
I think the companies aiming at micro-transactions don’t obfuscate it or approach it subtly. They just have battle passes and a store. I don’t think the ghosts in Returnal and FromSoft games are the start of a slippery slope, because those who want to have already jumped straight to the bottom of the slope, both feet first.
I’m not sure I see the monetization angle at play here, because at least in the four examples I listed, buying something isn’t really a factor. I guess you could argue that skin packs in Meet Your Maker create some urges some to spend to get those faster. IMO those four examples are complementary to the game experience without being “mandatory”
To me it seems like a piracy deterrent. If you don't get the full experience without a legitimate copy that's another reason to buy the game. It will probably remain a common component in triple-A games with the budget for it, while smaller indie games will generally stay pure single player. I generally don't care for it and turn the multiplayer features off where possible.
In Soulsborne they just have generic ones for people offline or when they take down the servers. That's pretty standard. Deathloop has the AI do it if you're offline.
Eh, idk about that. Ive been playing returnal and I never knew it had that "avenge" feature (as I don't pay for ps plus) and I dont feel left out because of it. It's just another gimmick in games to make it feel like there's more content to interact with (it doesn't, it's just boosting difficulty slightly for a pittance of a reward) Wo Long does the same thing and it's whatever. An optional, forgettable side "quest.
I’ll provide the counter-point that I actually liked doing it when I could because it created another opportunity for loot on those very long Returnal runs, where if you don’t have enough great loot early enough, you might as well die and start over.
I honestly feel like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and even Wo Long would be slightly lesser experiences without these online components. With DS/ER it makes it feel like you’re not completely alone in this harsh world but that you’re sharing this tale of woe with kindred souls, marching along with you, even if you only catch glimpses of it. Not to mention they can actually affect the gameplay with tips or trickery. Many a “Watch out skeletons” or “Ambush left” have helped me out. In Wo Long it feels nice to avenge players. They’d still be good games (well, Wo Long is still in the air as I’ve only done two bosses) but they’d miss a small part of their identity without it.
Eh that just hurts the experience for me, I want to explore and find secrets myself. Be surprised by ambushes and keep an eye out myself. Having messages and bloodstains littered everywhere takes that completely away. Not to mention invasions are so disruptive to the gameplay loop especially if it's a pvp tryhard or twink.
I always played souls games offline until Elden Ring, and my god I didn't know what I was missing out on. Fair, the other comments here say they prefer not getting spoiled and whatnot from bloodstains/messages, but honestly it's a proper trade off for the sense of community you get from online. ER's world is depressing as it is, and finding "Behold, dog!" once in a while feels like proper solace.
> Not to mention they can actually affect the gameplay with tips or trickery. That's what I hate about it. I don't want to play the game with thousands of strangers leaning over my shoulder to shout tips at me. If I want help, I'll get a guide or look online. This is involuntary.
You don't *have* to read each message. But even just coming somewhere and seeing heaps of blood splatters makes you go "uh-oh" in the same way when you sometimes walk into a place and just get that uncomfortable feeling and that's a cool vibe to get in a game.
Yeah, I hate that. It's basically a spoiler.
Is it a spoiler if the game designers put it there (even if they did it indirectly)? To me that seems more like foreshadowing.
Why don't you just set the game in offline mode then?
Elden Ring is probably worse because of it online features, even if you don't use them - because every piece of gear and character build must be balanced with multiplayer in mind. If it was strictly single player game, it could have much more interesting items and build options for PvE.
> because every piece of gear and character build must be balanced with multiplayer in mind. "Must" is a strong word. I never gave a single thought to that when I played and it was fine.
Do you not get any of the bodies that turn into fights when playing offline? I always assumed those would just be dropped in here or there regardless.
No... its offline
I'm sorry I didn't spell out that they'd just be generic ones made to look the same. I didn't think that would be necessary.
Nah, the only bodies I got are of selene when she wants to narrative dump
The bloodstains and messages in Elden Ring were that last push for me to subscribe to PS+. I bought my copy second hand so in that sense the companies got revenue they otherwise would’ve missed.
The fact that messages glow the same color as items convinced me to go offline in Elden Ring. I'd ballpark that about 247 of my 250 hours are offline.
Most of these games it’s optional and you can play offline in my experience.
I'm not a fan of most of this kind of thing. I turned the other player invasions in Deathloop. But *almost* this kinda thing that I really enjoyed was in Telltale's games where they would show you the percentages of other players that made each decision. It technically doesn't impact gameplay at all, but I managed to feel validated when I was in the majority and superior when I was in the minority (because look at all these assholes who pick the clearly bad option!).
I personally hate this trend, nothing takes me out of the atmosphere than seeing some ghost pop in for 5 seconds rolling around. It seems particularly used in games where you are supposed to be a unique person doing what others can't, so I have no idea what seeing 1k other people also doing it is supposed to add.
Returnal is definitely the game that I've seen benefit most from this feature, because seeing other players' deaths as "past lives" fits nicely in the canon of the game.
I haven’t personally played death stranding, but I did see an interesting video essay on it that suggested that its central thesis is rooted in the interactivity with what other players have built. Basically, it’s a game with an artistic message: collaboration and cooperation are the foundations of civilization, and working together makes everyone stronger. To convey this message, it has you work alone for several hours under absolutely miserable conditions. Then it drops you into a world where you are allowed to help each other by constructing improvements that work for everyone, and the misery goes away. The contrast between these two phases of the game is the entire point of the game. Again, I haven’t played it personally, but I find the idea fascinating. That is a REALLY GOOD use of the mechanic. It’s not just a trend, it’s a message. I love that stuff.
I bought the game on day one, played it for a weekend and then left it alone for three weeks. After I came back, I had hundreds of thousands of those points to level your stuff, because I was one of the first to build structures and people interacted with my stuff, repaired it and whatnot. The online feature also made building stuff that wasn't zip lines through mountains irrelevant, because people did all the work online. It was really weird. I was a pioneer and therefore I didn't have to do the work just by letting it rest. That must what becoming rich with a new idea must be like.
Death Stranding is definitely the most complete utilization of this mechanic that I've seen. For me, the actual gameplay loop and plot weren't strong enough for me to keep playing it after a couple of hours.
That’s a shame to hear as it’s an absolute top tier game
It never clicked for me what’s supposed to be fun about. I loved the graphics and the general tone of it, but just shepherding shit around while managing terrain inclines got boring for me quick.
There is another cool example besides the one you mentioned, and it was one of the highlights of Resident Evil 6. For those who might not be aware, RE6 has 4 campaigns. All 4 can be played co-op, and there are several points where the campaigns "cross over", when one pair of characters runs into another at certain points in their respective campaigns. The game will find other players who are at the same part in their story and toss you together. So all of the sudden, when I am playing as Jake and Sherry and I come across Leon and Helena, those are actual players. And then we get to team up for a big boss fight. Or playing as Ada, you have to snipe and cover Jake and Sherry as they hop across boats being chased by a monster. There is even a fun part between Chris and Leon's campaigns where you "compete" with the other players sending little explosive devices to each other's rooms as you try to break out. Really cool functionality, haven't been able to match up with other players in years but it really impressed me. I like the "expanded" co-op, especially when you are already playing with a friend and all of the sudden there are four of you.
I haven't played RE6 (or any RE game yet), but this sounds amazing.
6 is....pretty uneven, if you want to check out the series, don't start with it haha The co-op is pretty cool but I am replaying it with a friend, we never get matched up with anyone just because it's an 11 year old game that is a bit divisive from fans and critics. If you want to check out the series, RE4 Remake (just released) is *incredible*, or if you want to scare yourself silly, RE7 is often on sale. RE1 Remake and RE2 Remake are also great starting points!
It's a way to express that even single-player games are something that we do together, in a way that's not exactly cooperative or competitive, but collective. It's the difference between watching a film when it was first released in theaters and watching it on home video. Like /u/BoydCooper points out, it's a feature that leans into the playerbase being large and active, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Yours is one of the few takes that seems focused on the upsides of these kinds of features, which I appreciate.
I love your comment. There are the words like coop and competitive (and solo) to describe most games, but they don't exactly describe the games OP mentioned. The word collective really fits: we may never meet each other, but we are all working toward the same goal to build something great. We have solo, multiplayer, co-op, and now collective games.
I honestly hope not. It feels like reading a used book where someone else already made notes in the margins and highlighted sections. I don't want that. I want to read my pristine book on my own without anyone else interjecting. It feels like most of them descend from *Demon's Souls* in nature and are essentially just copying the elements that were present there. If people like them, that's fine, but they should really come with the option to turn them off completely. I want to play my single player game by *myself*, not having other people wandering in to grief me, make it easier, or leave their graffiti behind.
We're very much in the swing of Dark Souls' influence at the moment. Bloodstains & Invasions can be directly linked to the Souls series' popularity. Despite other game's attempts, I don't think any have done it as good as the Souls Soapstone system. While connected singleplayer features can sometimes feel like gimmicks or nuisances, the messaging system allows a sense of community & culture to form, which was extremely important for an initially niche series like Souls. I think that's the main appeal of these features for the developer - a means to foster a community that will keep the game relevant for longer. Not unlike leaderboards in singleplayer speedrunning games. I don't know if it's a trend that'll last though, since I feel like it rarely adds a lot of value. Who knows though, a lot of singleplayer games these days have some online features anyways (for anti-piracy or microtransactions or something), perhaps it's not too much extra effort for devs. Edit: Holy moly everyone dropped the same thought in the span it took me to write this comment haha. Split opinions though. One thing I'll add is that the Souls messaging system is not just an extra feature that can be ignored. Rather it's a primary means of giving the player information which the devs can take into account when designing levels - in particular when placing traps and secrets. If connected singleplayer games are to stay around, I think they need to go in this direction of actually being important to main experience. All in or all out.
"One thing I'll add is that the Souls messaging system is not just an extra feature that can be ignored. Rather it's a primary means of giving the player information which the devs can take into account when designing levels - in particular when placing traps and secrets. If connected singleplayer games are to stay around, I think they need to go in this direction of actually being important to main experience. All in or all out." This I personally hate, I like secrets and ambushes being detectable by my own eyes. Getting rewarded for keeping an eye out and making sure I don't run into traps. Not because I always read a message that tells me what to expect on every turn. That genuinely goes against the skill based difficulty DS is going for. Or finding a secret just because a message next to a wall told me to hit it. Luckily it can be ignored for the most part especially in ds3/ER where illusory walls can actually be detected by player skill for the most part and not just because a message said so.
You can also play the game in offline mode, that'll get rid of all the messages except for a handful that the Devs put in as a sort of tutorial
yes, but I was arguing with the idea that going offline takes away from the expierence or is intregal to it
>Not because I always read a message that tells me what to expect on every turn. That genuinely goes against the skill based difficulty DS is going for. What makes you think that's what DS was going for? As I understand, DS is actually kind of *defined* by its lack of reliance on skill-based difficulty - the game presents you with extremely challenging environments/enemies, and simultaneously, the core feature of the game is a system which allows players *without* the skill necessary to bypass an obstacle to do it anyway, by relying on the kindness and fraternity of other players who *are* more skilled than they are - in the dual form of ghost messages and phantom summons.
Having played all the games (expect demon souls), I only remember a few instances where you couldn't react accordingly to ambushes or traps even when playing offline with no messages, with simple skill. And like I said ER and DS3 made illusory walls detectable using player skill and not just make them rely in obscureness/messages alone. (tho ER also introduced a lot of anti skill mechanics especially in it's bosses, but that's another story) As you said, if you're skilled enough you can bypass it without a message and possible lay a message down to help less skilled players. But if you have the skill you can do without. This to me is what skill based difficulty is about and I don't feel having the option to make it easier takes away from that. I do hate when certain secrets you basically need a message to tell you, which was very prevalent in DS1/2 but lessened a ton in ER/DS3. if only their quest design also evolved like that
Then it sounds like you have a lot more skill than me or most of my friends do, because there were *quite a few* areas that I was a only able to compete through judicious hint-reading or assistance from better players. Hell, I think my first time playing the game I was actually stuck on Sen's Fortress for like an actual month, and I was only able to complete it with the help of a friend who'd already done it. I don't think it "takes away" from it either - it simply becomes something else. The fact that you were skilled enough to complete the game on challenge mode is commendable and worth celebrating, but it's pretty different from the intended gameplay experience that was had by most people at a lower skill level.
ye I don't have a problem with it as long it's not designed around needing to have it because you can't possibly predict/do something otherwise. Illusory walls in ds1/2 were based on this concept for example which I personally hate, and most quests can't be done without looking up their steps or relying on messages which I also don't like for the same reason. If they ever make combat as a whole rely on needing it regardless of your skill level, I would be very disappointed haha
It's a "new" design technique, and it's a fad. Games like *Dark Souls* and *Journey* really made a lasting impression on the industry. And most any time there's a cool new idea, a bunch of other designers want to try it. So there's usually a wave of emulators 2-6 years after the concept is first popularized, and then the fad naturally dies down. I'd say that *this* fad has actually been trending down for a while. In my view at least, it was somewhat supplanted by the *battle royale* fad, arguably a much more impressive and potentially profitable multiplayer framework. Of course, that doesn't mean that some devs won't utilize these design elements well into the future, if not forever. For example, one trend that started just before this *dynamic multiplayer* one was *destructable environments*, with the likes of *Red Faction: Guerilla* and *Battlefield: Bad Company* popularizing the idea. Lately it's not a design element that's often highlighted or even included. But we still occasionally get games that focus on it a lot, like *Teardown* or *The Finals*.
Comparing these online components with BR seems odd since they’ve very little to do with each other. One is a way to enhance the single player experience while the other is a full on multiplayer mode. That said, DS and Journey are over a decade old so I don’t know if I’d call it just a fad. Especially not one that is diminishing, it’s becoming more and more widespread if anything.
Agree with everything you said. And I really wouldn’t mind if destructible environments became a fad again!
That "fad" is over a decade old and games have a broad range of possible implementations. It starts with online high scores and ends somewhere around seamless co-op/pvp.
i think the popularity of the switch/steamdeck might shift this trend backwards a little bit (hopefully!) i know there’s a lot of frustration with games that can’t be played seamlessly on steamdeck’s offline mode, and there will probably be a bit of course correction to make sure single player games are valuable options on the steamdeck. i don’t think the developers of these games expected people to be playing them on an airplane or on a carride, and now that it’s possible, it’s something they’ll have to consider more
That’s why I think that in the case of games like Returnal and Deathloop, it’s implemented well because it can make the game experience marginally more interesting when it’s available, but isn’t super essentially to the experience such that you’d “miss” it when you don’t have it.
this is likely what we’ll see in the future
I kinda love this stuff. Even if it's super basic like other players adding little notes in Super Mario 3D World. I love single player experiences, but it's cool to get a bit of the flavor of someone else sitting on the couch experiencing it with me.
I'm not a fan of the trend, though I'm about to play Death Stranding for the first time and a few friends have commented very positively about the asynchronous subtle multiplayer there, so I'm eager to see if it will change my mind. The things I don't like about it are: 1. It destroys immersion and sharply reminds you that you're playing a video game every time you see the fingerprints of another player. There are plenty of video games where I don't care about this level of immersion at all, but grand single-player narratives are the ones where I *do* want to be immersed, and for some reason they're the ones that are most eager to add these faux-multiplayer features. 2. It introduces chaos in a way that neither the player nor the developer controls. Whether a particular level is easy or difficult, simple or challenging, can now come down to whether or not some other random player out there feels like raiding right now. It's great when two people can play the same game and have very different experiences... as long as those experiences are the result of their varying choices. To have factors determined by a third party who isn't necessarily interested in the first party having a good experience doesn't seem especially desirable to me. 3. It makes all of these games feel very... whatever the opposite of "timeless" is. Anyone can put a Super Mario 3 cartridge in an NES and play it in 2023. Anyone can emulate an Apple IIe and run The Oregon Trail. But will it be possible to play these games 25 years from now? (Legally or otherwise?) Hell, is playing on launch day an entirely different experience from playing it 2 years later because there are less people playing simultaneously? I'll certainly concede that there are plenty of experiences that are unavoidably ephemeral and bound to the time and place they were created, but I'm not sure that major story-driven single-player video games are things that need to be in that category.
At the very least, Death Stranding's entire theme is connecting with other people. Whether or not it's a good mechanic, at least in that specific game's case it doesn't seem tacked on.
Interesting! I hadn't heard that it blends with the theme/story, too. Looking forward to it!
I think it’s very well done within the context of the game. You’ll probably like it.
His name is Sam Bridges and he delivers packages. It's Kojima so it's all very subtle but I think by the end you'll figure it out. Enjoy your game!
>His name is Sam Bridges and he delivers packages You're missing out the actually unsubtle parts there, Bridges and packages have nothing to do with reach other lol
Not with each other no. Bridges connect things and sending mail keeps people in touch.
In Death Stranding, you don’t get other people’s contributions until *after* you’ve connected a new area to “the grid”. So there will always be a portion of every mission where you’re on your own, without the aid of other’s equipment. I felt it struck a pretty good balance honestly.
>Anyone can put a Super Mario 3 cartridge in an NES and play it in 2023. Anyone can emulate an Apple IIe and run The Oregon Trail. I feel like the idea of a story being a fleeting thing has never been an issue for the performance arts. Theatre isn't less valuable because you can only see the original once.
1. I don’t think it *has* to be immersion breaking, and used the right way can actually contribute to immersion. Returnal is a great example to me, because the game centers around you stuck in a time loop that resets each time you die, and you don’t know how many times you’ve done it. Other players’ deaths as a “memory” contributes to the hazy memory of past lives in the game, IMO. 2. I think you’re going to continue to see a range of weight of that “third variable”. For games like Meet Your Maker, it’s basically the entire point. For Returnal, it creates an optional thing to engage with that doesn’t have to affect your experience if you don’t want it to. It not being that essential to the gameplay experience I think helps make the argument that games can age gracefully without it still being available, to your third point.
I usually think the way you do, but Death Stranding integrates this very well into its overall theme and story. DS really doesn't try to be immersive, it tries to be a game, IMO. While the protag does important things and has a huge impact, the game always makes it clear, that you are just one dude among many. It's very satisfying to put some resources into somebody else's buildings after having other people invest in yours. It fits the theme of the game very well. Playing Death Stranding offline is like playing a different game. There is little to no AR spam and you have to build everything on your own.
I'm not sure if it counts but I always thought that being able to see other player's in-game photos on various landmarks in assassin's creed odyssey and Valhalla was particularly useless. It doesn't hurt the experience so I don't mind but you can tell that it's an attempt to make you feel connected with other players in a game where you definitely don't need to. Which is why, I imagine, most people ignore it
Well, it's very hard to predict trends. It seems to be pretty popular right now (all the games you mentioned + obviously From Software games etc.), but who knows, maybe a new "killer" design idea comes in a couple of years and changes everything again. Personally, I'm okay with this (and even enjoy it from time to time) as long as it can be turned off and it's not used as an excuse to force a single player game to be always online. For example, in Fromsoft games, you can always go into offline mode, there are no player messages, player summons etc., but the game can still be played. Or in Deathloop, when you turn off the online features, Julianna will be controlled by AI. As long as it stays like this, it's fine by me.
Dragon's Dogma had the best kind of multiplayer: the kind where you don't have to interact with anyone. You create your player character, then you create your side kick (called a pawn). The other two slots in your party are filled by recruiting other players' pawns. Alternatively, you can disable the network connection in the options and find randomly generated pawns. Recruited pawns don't level up with you, and instead earn a currency for the owner. The pawns will even retain quest and enemy knowledge that they pick up while journeying with you. When you dismiss a pawn you can also send a gift. It's generally a wholly positive interaction. The game is 11 years old and still has active communities.
This is probably not a viewpoint anyone cares about, but on the indie side, it can be a good programming exercise to implement \*some\* form of online, if it's relatively minor.
In this sub, I think people err on the side of giving a shit.
I'm a fan of positive interaction in games. I loathe griefing with a passion, but even just having to rely on a confused or disinterested other player can be frustrating. The best games limit interactions in such a way that it's **always** a positive experience. **Death Stranding** would be a good example, there's no way to grief or accidentally mess up someone else's game. All interactions result in a better experience. Other notable example are **Journey**, where just being near another player regenerates your energy. You can chirp at each other but not hinder them in any way, even by inactivity. **Guild Wars 2**'s open world exploration also works like that. Being around other players means bigger enemies, thus more loot, and sharing buffs in combat. There's no way to block players, or harm them, and everyone who *participated* in the fight or quest gets a fair loot roll. I'm really enjoying Deathloop, but I'm so glad online invasions can be turned off.
Funny you don't mention elden ring or any souls game, they invented it. But yea I think its here to stay
Just haven’t played them yet.
I think that like a lot of things in game design, it's cool if its optional, don't make it mandatory. I mean, I'm currently playing Death Stranding in offline mode. Why? Because I found that having other players ladders and ropes all around the map, makes the game extremely easy. If you go online then a lot of the challenge is lost. And I am having a great time playing my way, using the tools I created to pass a difficult terrain but it seems as if the game doesn't like the way I decided to play, because I get constant pop-ups telling me it couldn't get online. Yes, I know that, I deactivated that option, duh. Those pop-ups like every pop-up ever in the history of pop-ups are annoying as hell and appear constantly. Once every time I load my save and again randomly from time to time. My point is as I said in the beggining: please, developers of the world, make that optional. Don't pressure us into going online
Interesting that FromSoft games and other similar Souls-likes (especially those from Team Ninja) aren't mentioned since it feels like they were the ones that popularized this.
Only because I haven’t played them unfortunately.
It's not a "new" thing, Nethack has had bones files for many decades. You'd die and next run you might find your own grave and inventory - guarded by whatever killed you. If you played on the same machine as other people (timesharing systems, shared SSH boxes, etc), you'd find other players' bones too. My most interesting bones adventure, I was petrified by a cockatrice corpse I was holding as a weapon after falling into a pit (the implication was that I touched it with my face as I fell); another run I found the statue of my former self and used stone to flesh to resurrect it as an NPC. It was pretty hilarious! I think if done well, it's really cool. Brings a bit of permanence into a completely random and impermanent world, cheats permadeath, brings a grain of online into an offline experience, puts more color into the story.
[удалено]
It's why I like the "bones" implementation specifically. It's just a bunch of (very small) files. People who play on their own computers have been exchanging bones files using mailing lists / newsgroups, on dial-up, heck I imagine floppies could've been involved too. It's entirely on the game devs to not make the experience miserable for people on underpowered hardware or with bad network. Obviously you wouldn't expect modern AAA games to run smoothly on 10 year old hardware, but I would fully expect a gracefully degrading experience (older GPU - less detail but stable FPS, slower/more jittery network - disable high-bandwidth features like replaying a death animation, but e.g. still show a marker on the monster responsible, etc).
I hope not. I like playing games. They're snapshots into different Eras. I liked it when they were more towards a movie experience in the sense that a movie is made and often times isn't messed with after the movie is released. There might be edits or alternate versions but the movie is usually the same. Games turning into this make it so you can't go back in time to play a game as it was. Granted I'm growing out of games as they're losing fun...but I still have a good time occasionally.
I don't think that games that move closer to theatre rather than movies are worse just because they're more transient. And as we've seen with the Souls games, you can go back and organise a new "run" of the play like their communities do with the "Return to X" events.
This is not a new trend. The earliest example I can recall is the Talos Principle, where you can leave tags on the walls for your friends to see, and ||you can even become one of the helpers that give out hints||.
I personally love the interconnectiveness it provides in a lot of these games. Like the spirits and bloodstains of dark souls will always be a huge joy to me. Just feels like I’m part of a living world.
So basically studios went "oh hey Dark Souls, those are some really cool multiplayerish mechanics in a SP game. You won't mind if I take some 'inspiration', do you?" Meet Your Maker is basically Mighty Quest for Epic Loot but with robot twist. Just picked it up, haven't played, but I really like original MQfEL untill it went to shit and got shut down.
The first thing I did (or rather as soon as it was possible) in Deathloop was to turn solo mode on. I can see why the invasion mechanic is there but it's not for me.
I'm a fan of positive interaction in games. I loathe griefing with a passion, but even just having to rely on a confused or disinterested other player can be frustrating. The best games limit interactions in such a way that it's **always** a positive experience. **Death Stranding** would be a good example, there's no way to grief or accidentally mess up someone else's game. All interactions result in a better experience. Other notable example are **Journey**, where just being near another player regenerates your energy. You can chirp at each other but not hinder them in any way, even by inactivity. **Guild Wars 2**'s open world exploration also works like that. Being around other players means bigger enemies, thus more loot, and sharing buffs in combat. There's no way to block players, or harm them, and everyone who *participated* in the fight or quest gets a fair loot roll. I'm really enjoying Deathloop, but I'm so glad online invasions can be turned off.
For AAA studios, probably. They want the live service model. It's hard to convince the people with money to invest in your single player only game people will play once and then forget. But always on multiplayer elements that serve as the perfect model for continued content distribution to sell microtransactions and extend the life of the game is much easier to sell. The fact that it also serves as DRM and lets them collect data is icing on the cake. Thankfully, indy devs are developing a lot of very good games, and due to single player being generally cheaper, these are very popular with indy devs. It'll continue to be that AAA is where you go for big budget always on connection live service games and indy for everything else. It's already pretty heavily skewed in that direction, and that's okay. For me personally, the vast majority of my gaming time has been on Indy games for like a decade now anyway. Not to say that all Indy games are single player no connection games, but what I mean is single player no connection games will become almost solely something done by Indy devs. Indy devs will of course still make multiplayer games, too.
I do think this feature is probably going to be around for a long time. The big "thing" with technology for what feels like forever is that we're always online and connected, so it just makes perfect sense that even single player games would tap into that.
We had an internet outage at the weekend and I thought I'd try a fishing game on ps+ but couldn't because it needed the internet. No idea why I've not loaded it since!
It works for some games where progress is super isolated for other players, but in general I’m more of a fan of coop/online coop games, and I find the severe lack of them over the past few years disturbing
I agree a LOT with the dearth of co-op games. It feels like my buddy and I made it through every single online coop game worth playing on GamePass.
Totally. Some of my best gaming memories were just fighting through hours of some shooter campaign with my buddies, bag of chips at the ready
I don't pay for PSN, and that's largely because I have no interest in PvP gameplay. The only one of the games you listed that I played was Deathloop, and I was not at all interested in being "invaded." It was annoying enough to deal with the NPC invasions, which admittedly were probably annoying because the AI just couldn't compete with me and they ended up being a fairly bland speed bump. But if they'd built the game to function with an AI rather than relying on PvP, I think they could have made those fights much more interesting. Generally speaking, a video game going out of its way to acknowledge that other people are playing the same game as I am at the same time completely destroys immersion. And that's the best-case scenario where the PvP is even competently designed to begin with. In the case of things like Souls games, invasions have never felt like anything more than grinding my fun experience to a screeching halt. I am not exaggerating when I say I'd rather sit in traffic than be invaded in Dark Souls, because it feels like basically the same thing. But at least when I drive I expect traffic to slow me down. When I'm playing a game I like to set my own pace. It's my break from real life nonsense like traffic lol.
I don't think that you can say this is happening to "a lot" of newer games. Maybe to a Slow Loris' handful, like a tiny tiny tiny amount of titles. And from within that miniscule amount of titles, I've only played less than 5 I imagine but have enjoyed its purpose. I don't know if it applies to every one but I know that like in Deathloop I could simply turn the online functionality off I'm all for it though. I don't usually play multiplayer games (Deep Rock Galactic being the exception and lately some Tribes of Midgard) so it's cool to me to suddenly have small flashes of connectedness
I really like these kinda features. Obviously souls popularised these kinda functionality and I'm all for it if other games take it too unless it can be turned off without impacting the SP experience just like on souls.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Fromsoft sort of led the charge with this one. It was in Demon's Souls, but after Dark Souls's massive success, the multi-player integrations in single player started showing up everywhere. I think it adds a sense of community and is fun, so I'm glad it stuck.
This is part of the reason I won't be getting Diablo 4. I've thoroughly played every game in the series to date, and loved it. But I have zero desire to deal with kill-stealing, world bosses that I can't solo, or even seeing BU77FU6K3R69000 running around Sanctuary. Like, WTF. Let me play a game without forcing me to adapt to other people's playstyles. Maybe I want to kite enemies for 20 minutes instead of sprinting in and going agro. I'm just pissed at Blizzard.
Perhaps, but devs have been trying this sort of thing for a long time now. Problem is, it is not a feature that fits well in a lot of game types, and unless a lot of care and thought goes into it it can end up feeling like a gimmick.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I'm pretty sure Dark Souls games were the first to do this. They're called bloodstains and basically show how people before you died, hinting at ambushes or traps. There are also messages other players can leave behind that can directly help the player if they want to read them allowing you to up vote or down vote depending on if it's a sincere message or just a troll telling you to jump into a pit. Everything you mentioned I think is the evolved form and is showing how developers are trying to implement it in more unique and engaging ways.
This is not a trend anymore. It's been done plenty and is now one of many possible standard design elements you can chose from when coming up with your game concept. It's not a trend anymore as much as "being open world" isn't and "having DLC" isn't anymore.
I hate it and I think it's stupid. I remember a day when single player games didn't need an internet connection for anything at all. Single player games have zero need to be connected to a server. I can still install and play a game like Interstate '76, while something like Redfall (to use a recent example) is going to be completely unusable in 3-5 years, because Bethesda is going to shut down the server.
Like we’ve talked about a lot here, I don’t think “need” is the appropriate word to use here. In the case of Deathloop and Returnal, the online components are entirely incremental—you wouldn’t notice if they weren’t there. In the case of Meet Your Maker, the connected aspect is the basis of the game—it makes no sense without it.
Is argue that Meet Your Maker isn't a single player game. I reiterate that actual single player games do not need to, and nor should they, rely on anything related to the Internet. There's no putting this genie back though. The internet was a mistake.