Multiplayer only games

I've just a painful conversation with someone about the new Battlefront game and why people asking for more single player content isn't unreasonable. His view was why should devs spend time adding new modes to single player when they're already in multiplayer, my response was because Multiplayer is temporary, and he just didn't get it.

My view of the situation is if I'm paying £50-£60 for a game I want to be able to play it whenever I want as I own that copy of the game, I have games from the early 2000's and even from the 90's that are completely playable still now. A game that is online only or mostly online doesn't have this option, once the company running the server decides to call it a day the game dies there and then and is for the most part unplayable so even though I'm paying full price for the game I'm still essentially just renting it from the publisher/developer for as long as they're willing to keep the server on.

Am I the only one who think this and wants to see games returning to focus on single player too? Or do you only play multiplayer games and don't see the value of single player?

Just curious about people's thoughts on the subject.

OG Titanfall was awesome despite being multiplayer-only. HITMAN was my and this site's GOTY last year and it was single-player only. There isn't a "one size fits all" rule on this, IMO, provided what's there is done well as it was in these cases.

Regarding Battlefront, the lack of a campaign wasn't my biggest issue with the first reboot, nor is the brevity of the campaign in this year's Battlefront II up high on the list of problems with that game. The BFII campaign just seems fairly mediocre from what I've played of it. Were it of higher quality, or if the multiplayer in the last Battlefront had some more depth/variety, people wouldn't be making as much of a fuss about the campaigns in the Battlefront games, although the narrative around anything and everything Battlefront II has become fairly groupthink with general negativity at this point anyway. It's fine as a game for the most part, but I'd much rather them fix the progression and eliminate bullshit currencies and bottlenecks than have a few more levels on that campaign.

I'm trying to think of a game old enough to where multiplayer wouldn't be possible (let's call that a decade-plus) that I actually still get value replaying the campaign of, and Halo: CE is about the only one I return to from time to time, and even that actually got a MP reboot. With backwards compatibility making a bit of a comeback, in addition to re-releases, the idea of amazing multiplayer games being no longer playable is less of a concern. I half-expect the Demon's Souls news of late to result in either enough of an outcry to keep the servers online (again), or people coming up with ways to do it.

For me, a lack of a campaign or lack of multiplayer isn't a "no sale" situation. If I had my choice of devs doing one very well or doing a half-ass job on both to try and appease all the gamers out there, I damn sure know what I'll choose. There have been so many throwaway campaigns and attempts to tack on bad multiplayer to games that don't need it just so they can check a box and say it's there, and it's all a waste of everyone's time. Make what's in the game good, regardless of if its SP or MP, and I'm happy.

No idea why you can't have both honestly. I don't want single player bullshit in CSGO, and I don't want multiplayer bullshit in Witcher.

@notnert427: OG Titanfall is a perfect example, it was great but 3 of the servers have already been shut down and the rest aren't really populated enough to get regular matches. Revisiting this game isn't going to be possible soon, if they had offline bot modes it would have solved the problem but pretty soon anyone who liked the look of it will have to skip it or some poor bugger is going to buy it second hand for cheap and get home to find it's unplayable.

But I've been pretty regularly been playing Battlefront 2005 since it came out and when the servers died it didn't change a thing as all of the multiplayer modes are available offline too, and apparently I wasn't the only one as Disney saw the amount of people still playing it and turned the servers back on lol. But I do see what you're saying, I suppose if you have no plans to revisit a game then it won't be a problem for you but I do like having the option I guess.

I greatly prefer single player games, but I still buy multiplayer-only games on rare occasion. I almost always get my money's worth of a multiplayer game by the time the servers get shut off, so it's not too big a deal.

I'm assuming you're talking about PC for Titanfall? It was virtually DOA there for reasons I still don't understand. I just checked on Xbox, and it took all of ten seconds to find a full game. I'm sure it will eventually die off, but there will probably be a Titanfall 3 by the time that happens. The game is three and a half years old and it's still going, so it's certainly had a good run, and it's arguably a bit unreasonable to expect to be able to play it a half-decade or more after its release.

It's also worth mentioning that single-player games aren't always playable forever, either. P.T. is a recent example. Also, cartridges from the pre-digital age break/stop working all the time and are sometimes nearly irreplaceable. And what about always-online games like HITMAN? Someday those servers will get shut down. Unless you're approaching Jeff CollectSHUN levels with some of this stuff, it's hard to keep games playable years down the road, whether they're SP or MP, but most of the true classics will survive.

Video games, as they are now and as they have always been, are dangerously close to being a temporary thing that we can't return to.

Even if we were guaranteed that all servers were going to stay up and running forever, we would have to realize that every single multiplayer-only game has a lifespan. At some point, nobody's going to be playing that game.

There are a tiny handful of games for which this is not true. People are still finding ways to play 90's id games. Quake 3 is still playable. There are still people devoted to Counter-Strike 1.6 and Day of Defeat. But for the vast majority of multiplayer games, there will come a day where nobody's playing it anymore, even if the servers are still up and running. "Offline with bots" is a thing you can try, but that's nothing better than a rough approximation of what the game is actually like and if you think anything different, you haven't played enough multiplayer games. Multiplayer games eventually dying out is just a very likely potential that you've got to accept when you go buy a multiplayer-only or multiplayer-focused game.

I'm also primarily a single-player guy and that's starting to become a problem, too. Backwards compatibility is becoming less of an issue, what with modern PC's and consoles not being that different from one another, but requiring online connectivity is more a problem now than ever. What if one day, that DRM can't authenticate and you can't play your old favorite on that new computer you just built? What if one day, you have a legacy game that flat-out won't work on the latest version of Windows and nobody has seen fit to figure out how to make it work and you don't have the know-how to get it working yourself? What if one day, computer architecture and design changes in such a radical and drastic way that most legacy programs don't work? What if one day, Windows ceases to be the major operating system and getting an old copy of Windows to function is a long and difficult process? What if nobody ever creates a PS4 emulator and Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, and Horizon all disappear into time and nobody's able to play them a hundred years from now? What about when you can't update some of your favorite games because the servers giving out those patches have been shut down?

Some video game experiences are largely just gone already, or will start disappearing soon. How many people here have played games in a busy arcade sometime in the past five years? Outside of Japan, where arcades still seem to be popular. What if someone finds themselves interested in what was done with Microsoft's Kinect? That's going to get more and more difficult over the next decade.

This is post is full of what-ifs and some of them are pretty crazy, I know. I'm just throwing some stuff out there. But my point still stands that all video games, not just multiplayer ones, have a very real potential to be temporary.

I think the value argument specifically is a weird one. Most of my favorite games of all time are multiplayer-focused or multiplayer-only. I've played several thousand hours of Diablo II; over two thousand hours of Team Fortress 2. Are those games worth less than Mass Effect or BioShock, which I played for under 50 hours, just because their servers might be gone someday?