Single player vs. Multiplayer?

Are Developers spending too much time on Single player games and not enough time on Multiplayer ones? It seems to me that Multiplayer in too many games is merely an after thought. Obviously, I'm not talking about MMPOGs because they're Multiplayer by design. What do people prefer, Multiplayer or Single Player?

John~

I think probably single player will always be more popular than multi because people generally are egocentric and like to play by themselves to achieve their personal best against the game. There are of course lots of people that love to be in a group scenario or with a friend or two. I do think it is probably therefore mostly an afterthought unless it's a game that specifically is aimed at multiplayer, like a two-player thrust battle game or something like that. They all have their place.

I think multiplayer is a good thing for community building if you can produce a game that stays chalenging and interesting, or allows customization.

I'm one of those people that typicaly doesn't like multiplayer all that much. Fighting games, sports games, and racing maybe. Some RTS type games, but not anything realtime that requires team work.

Xbox live was kind of cool if you could be bothered to collect a group of friends you like to play with and keep the annoying twits out, realtime voice chat is a must for anything competitive, typing just ruins the immersion and breaks up the gameplay.

I prefer single player not too linear story based action games that require thought and planning, so MP doesn't really lend itself all that well to the kinds of games I like.

No they aren't. Most MMOs are multiplayer versions of singleplayer designs.

I think it's sad that you can't get a decent singleplayer game anymore.

Problem I see with games that have a multiplayer subset is the fact that the majority of titles out now just have a small selection of little maps, and the standard cookie-cutter gameplay modes, and do near next to nothing to mix things up a bit to make them interesting....

I prefer single-player.

I haven't seen any decrease in multiplayer games. As a matter of fact it seems multiplayer is standard nowadays.

Are you speaking of the quality of the multiplayer version or the lack of?

I'm with Puki - single player is tops.

Just that, what justluke just said :)

Single player. Nobody is usually having a daily LAN party at home and it is quite difficult to have your "fellowship" always around you when you enter the virtual world and want to finish your cyberspace adventure.

I'm only interested in multiplayer games when they have strong bots that can serve as a substitute for human players. I don't like playing online with people that I have never met in real life, and like I've said above, I'm also not running daily LAN parties at home. So if the game has a multiplayer option, bots are a mandatory requirement, otherwise it's a waste of hard disk space.

Multiplayer games like Bubble Bobble & Smash TV are a lot of fun...my favourite multiplayer games - I guess modern equivalents might be ???

Single player- adventure games - relaxed slow pace with engaging story, some humour, very few of these around now though.

So to answer the original question - what do I prefer? - depends on the situation but at the moment probably the first ones I mentioned - only because I haven't seen any of the second.

Seems like most of you like Single over Multiplayer. I agree with most of your statements, it's definitely hard to get people together to play MMPOGs in Fellowships, Raids and whatnot. Nobodies doing daily LANs either, but simplify the scope of the question even further. Everyone's got a friend that comes over to the house or flat. Where have just the 2-player games gone? Most of you probably remember that all Mario's prior to Mario 64 had Luigi as Player 2. Games like Double Dragon, Life Force and Contra had simultaneous two player modes where having two players was way more fun than playing by yourself. Think of all the "A" Title games on the shelves now. God of War II, The Grand Theft Series, etc. Single player only. Are we just all becoming a bunch of anti-social gamers as a society?

John~

I prefer in this order:

- coop multi-player (ewll depends who you team up with)
- single player
- multiplayer

I'm with you on that Grey - co op multiplayer is great. It's how I used to play starcraft with custom maps I made where a few of us would undertake some mission with a scripted enemy against us.

I agree with BasicMonkey. My cousin plays alot of video games, and its always better when I or someone else can join in on the action, when I visit. Its not like we play games every day, but its much funner when we do play. Too many games simply don't offer a two-player or more version of the game. My favorite feature of the N64 was that it was built with 4 controller ports - definitely ready for party-capable games. Now, it seems top brass games require you to have 4 systems, 4 TVs, 4 copies of the game, all networked together, if you want to play with 3 other friends. Who has money for that?

But I agree, what happened to games like Contra, where two friends could coop through the same missions? Contra dealt with the complications of the game simple enough - if one player lags too far behind in the waterfall level, for example, they simply die by falling. It wouldn't be hard to set up, because it follows so closely with the single-player mode. Why can't games like God of War or Command&Conquer do similar things?

I've been working on a clone of Snakes that will be online multiplayer, and single-PC multiplayer with up to 4 people. I've got to admit, its taken a bit more work than I had hoped to get it all working. But I hope the concept will do well. But it does inherit the problems mentioned here: finding fun people to play with would be difficult, and your friends would most likely not be online when you want to play.

My favourite game on the Amiga was Settlers 2. A split screen multiplayer RTS game. The PC version was never as good due to the lack of dual mice support that the amiga had.

The other series I enjoyed were the lotus challenge games, split screen and great fun.

I'm mainly for single player and i enjoy Split screen games.