Best multiplayer game in the last gen?

Hey,

I think the PS3/Wii/XB360 was when console online multiplayer developed into something properly respectable. I have shitloads of good memories from playing on Xbox live. So what were your favorite online games of the last generation? Feel free to share some specific memories.

Personally, I'd vote Battlefield: Bad Company 2. That game provided me some insane level of BANTZ. When you had a 4-man squad of friends all with their heads tilted forward in full-on-concentration-mode you could make MAGIC happen. I still remember when my buddy figured out that you could strap 4 fully perked up players' worth of C4 (so a good 24 sticks of C4) on the remote controlled UAVs and fuck up the game completely by flying that thing into tanks and objectives and detonating it, without any danger to yourself. Or just the countless very very close victories when we managed to win as attackers with 0 respawns left. Or when we managed to sneak special ops-style into the enemy base and steal their crucially important helicopter gunship before they could get it airborne. Or the many action-movie-style "WHERE'S THE GODDAMN EXTRACTION?" moments when one or two of us were desperately holding out against overwhelming opposition while another tried to pick us up with a helicopter.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Not only the best multiplayer, but also the best game of last gen.

I had the most fun with Modern Warfare 2. I remember how much crazier it was compared to the first Modern Warfare. I think I played that for 3 months straight. The day it came out, I skipped school. The day after, I went to school and then pretended to be sick so I could go home and play more. I still play occasionally and it's still a lot of fun. The game facilitated a huge variety of playstyles with the most useful COD arsenal to date.

Bad Company 2 would be a close second. That was my first real battlefield experience. I remember playing days of the beta which was just one map.

i was thinking nothing lived up to halo 2 from the previous generation for me, but then i remembered dark souls 2 counts as last gen, right? for a few evenings before they nerfed shrine of amana i was bringing players through time and again, getting a ton of souls and a lot of appreciation, then the next the thing you know i'm out of a job.

overall i found the co-op versus bosses in ds2 to be pretty great. it's damn silly that a lot of players seemed to have refused to summon as a point of pride, missed out on the best part of the game, and went and made complaints about the difficulty instead.

To me the last gen was when multiplayer gaming died. The proliferation of perks systems made it so that everyone I killed was the result of an unfair advantage that I had, while everyone who killed me had an unfair advantage over myself, or so would be my excuse. I greatly prefer to know that the player I killed died because I was a better player. It's no surprise to me then that the two games that I played the most multiplayer in, Warhawk and Motorstorm Pacific Rift, do not have perks systems. It's also why I think MOBAs have gained so much traction.

It's also crazy to me that Burnout Paradise still has better multiplayer than GTAV, despite coming out almost 6 years before it.

But Rock Band is clearly multiplayer of the generation.

its a tie between bad company 2 and black ops 1.

@mosespippy: i dont know if you played any MOBAS but they sure got what you effectivly would call perks even tho its actually called, "talents", "runes", or whatever.

Probably Modern Warfare 2. Even if I liked a lot of the changes done and added throughout the Black-Ops series and I thought Modern Warfare 3 was alright, none of them probably came close to how much I liked MW2 at the time. When Advanced Warfare came out I sat down and tried out all of the last gen CoD multiplayers (except ghosts). And though I felt most at home in Black-Ops 2 because it was the most recent one I played, I still felt almost just as home in Modern Warfare 2 which I hadn't played for years.

But playing them back to back for a few hours, it was interesting to see how micro changes to gun handling really makes a difference over time.

Objectively it's Call of Duty 4. It completely changed the first person shooter and made Call of Duty the biggest annual franchise ever.

Personally it's Dokapon Kingdom. It's like Mario Party but also a JRPG. Still haven't managed to play a full game though since it takes forever. You young whippersnappers with your Xbox Lives and your PSNs, local multiplayer is where it's at.

As long as it's available in some form or another, Toejam & Earl will always be the answer. At least the first game.

Good call! That game was a shitload of fun even though, like you, my friend and I never managed to finish a game because they take too damned long. Second best JRPG on the Wii just behind Xenoblade Chronicles.

Absolutely Call of Duty 4. All the Call of Duties after that added too much and made the game bloated.

Me too. With 100 000 kills in that game, it's by far the game I played the most in the previous generation.

Test Drive Unlimited. Open world racing with integrated multi- and single player events, cars, bikes, tracks, road and dirt. All in one game. Sure it wasn't a triple-A, but it was a proof of concept that showed how dated the racing genre really still is. I can't believe it's 2015 and still nobody has executed on that concept at a higher level.

TDU2 had a lot of improvements but it took a lot of bad feedback from focus testing and cramped all of the events into a stupid system. Burnout was too arcade. Horizon 1 was walled in, you could barely call it open world. Horizon 2's multiplayer isn't seamlessly integrated. The Crew is a mess. Every other game is too segregated; if you want track, open world, bikes, cars, asphalt, dirt, whatever - you have to swap out one game for another. The TDU concept was to have it all and second-rate as it was, just racing around with friends and randoms with all options available, that was fun. Someone needs to take the TDU concept, sim it up, and execute it with polish. Horizon 3? The Crew 2? Maybe Codemasters will make Dirt-Grid-World? A Sim Racer by Rockstar? I'm still waiting.

COD4 -> Dark Souls -> BFBC2

I would have loved to play BFBC2 more but the really terrible matchmaking system forced me to dump it... Heres hoping that we get to see BFBC3!

Gears of War 1 was the pinnacle of online gaming for me.

It was a mess, but I know that I will never have the same experience again. It was from a certain age when all friends could be online most of the time.

Shadowrun, MW4 and Halo 3 deserve a mention too.

I had a lot of fun with MW2 as well, of course in many ways it's "worse" than Cod4 but the zeitgeist along with that game was so fun. Everybody at my school copped an xbox and that game even if they previously had little interest in gaming. You'd turn on your console a regular weekday evening and like 5+ of your friends would be playing. A lot of good memories.

BC2 still takes it, but only by a thin thin margin

Of course there was also halo 3, reach and ODST but I always found co-op/single player a little more fun in that. Split screen forge mode on Halo 3 actually is up there.

Warhawk. Huge battles, a ton of tactical options, very rewarding for a good team, and I was pretty good at it for some reason.

Personally, I spent the most time with Halo 3 and Reach. But Modern Warfare was amazing upon release, and Bad Company 2 is still my favorite Battlefield due to its chaotic, unpredictable nature.

Tekken 6 also got a lot of playtime. Had some great fights, and although Tag 2 was great I ened up getting my ass kicked more than I would've liked.

I played more Black Ops than anything else. So I'd probably say that. But Street Fighter IV was also great.

Call of Doody 4: Modern Warfare. I don't really spend much time in multiplayer games but at the time, CoD4 was me and my brothers drug. I miss that game. Some of My other favorites would be The Last of Us, Uncharted 2, and Transformers: War for Cybertron.

MAG and Warhawk were both pretty good...right?

Halo 3 Customs were the shit

Really hard to pick between Halo 3 and Bad Company 2. Just two incredible games right there

Assassin's Creed 3/Brotherhood

AC3 is the best by a fair amount on the multiplayer front but Brotherhood was really fun right around launch before people knew what to do.

Kind of sad that almost the entire thread is shooters, guess that's the mark of last gen.

Mount and Blade: Warband

Monster Hunter Tri! Played it all day everyday with friends and random people from launch day until they shut the servers down. I hunted every monster, made every armor and weapon and then helped everybody I knew do it! It was a terrible terrible addiction that consumed me. And I would do it all over again given the chance. The rush of leading a 4 man team head long into battle with an unknown monster was an amazing thing; What does it look like? Can we cut off it's tail? Did we bring the right elemental weapons?! Is the armor worth grinding for now or later? To much fun. There were trying times as well, teaching new players how to deal with the toughest / most challenging monsters like Jhen Mohran and Deviljho. Training people to use weapons other than the Sword and Shield. It was an amazing once in a generation (maybe in a lifetime) experience I will never forget and I'm glad I had.

Brotherhood's multiplayer was awesome. I felt it lost a little something with every subsequent release. I couldn't even play AC4's multiplayer, everybody just runs at there target and goes for kill quantity over quality and forsaking stealth in all entirety.

@harkat: My money is either on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Halo: Reach, or Halo 3. Most underrated online game is Warhawk on the Ps3.

Modern Warfare. Rock Band 1/2/3 etc

@therealmoot: AC4 was definitely the worst of the bunch but both AC3 and ACR had some noticeable improvements to the formula; though the playerbase definitely worsened over time and killed a few of the modes.

Red Faction: Guerrilla's multiplayer was probably my favorite. Goddamn that was so much fun. And Left 4 Dead, too. Both of 'em.

Modern warefare started/perfected so many aspects that are still in most multiplayer experiences today that its impossible to say much else.

Modern warfare 2!

Unpopular opinion incoming but I love and still play COD3 multiplayer. No perks or leveling. Everyone has the choice from 6 classes with the same weaponry. The lobby time is short and you can choose which game to dive in right from the start rather than pick a game type and have the game find a good match without offering you the choice on which map, host and which game with how many players are playing.

Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was pretty good also but it died too soon. :(

CoD4 and Gears 1 both jump out at me, as they're probably the two i played the most (and I will buy the fuck out of a a CoD4 remaster). So much that I earned the "Seriously..." Achievement in Gears without cheesing it.

Does Team Fortress 2 count?

Team Fortress 2.

Black Ops 2 and The Last of Us off the top of my head

This. Also Left 4 Dead 1.

If we're just talkin consoles, it'd probably be Rock Band/Guitar Hero for me. Dunno which ones specifically. They all sorta bleed together in my memory.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2... hands down, lock it up!

@therealmoot: Forgot to mention: Wolfpack in AC4 is really really good despite them fucking up wanted (also the maps and the personas are mostly excellent). Basically they nailed all the difficult stuff and screwed up the really easy stuff (i.e. leave Wanted the way it is). Destiny 0.5? Ignoring the fantastic singleplayer of course.

@rebel_scum: I played ME3 like 6 months ago and there were still plenty of people around.

Halo 3

MW2, Halo 3 or Gears of War 3.

Left 4 Dead

As much as I didn't care for them, I think the answer has to be Rock Band and Wii Sports. How manu people came together as family, friends, and colleagues to play those two games? I mean, hell, there's a Wii in the nursing home here in town that the folks use there to exercise, and they love it. Those types of games really kind of revitalized local multiplayer.

My personal favorites were the Borderlands games, followed by Halo 3.