Multiplayer games for solo players (PC)?

So I suffer from anxiety, depression and agoraphobia (all of which I am getting treatment for - therapy, meds, care worker), to the point that even playing games where I am forced to work in a team often triggers panic attacks due to excessively worrying about messing up, letting the team down, or generally just being judged for my play. and yeah, I acknowledged how ridiculously pathetic that is. I'd like to have a multiplayer game I can play, though I'd like one that I can play alone, a free for all sort of thing, where I can just hop in as a distraction, play a couple of rounds and be done. Any suggestions?

I suffer from similar things, although from the sounds of it not as extreme.

So I think there are a few ways to approach this.

Playing truly solo: Starcraft 1v1 (although those are hardly a casual distraction) or something like deathmatch in shooters. In Counter Strike, play deathmatch or gun game - no teams to worry about. You could also play Quake, Unreal, Reflex, or any other death match shooter. You could also look into Dota 2 or Starcraft custom maps, as those can often be any size and many are playable alone or in individual teams, depending on the game mode.

Playing on a team where people won't care or notice: so if you play a team game with a more casual setting with larger teams, I find the pressure greatly reduced. TF2 was always my favorite for this as it's a fairly relaxed game in general, and this is amplified even more on larger servers. You can do the same for Counter Strike or Battlefield as well - just play on big community servers where the stakes are lowered and people will barely even notice what you're doing. I still get anxious about doing 5v5 or 6v6 because I feel the pressure to perform, but 16v16 is such a cluster people really won't pay attention to you at all.

I can try to think of other stuff if I had an idea of the sorts of games you like.

It kind of depends on which genres you're thinking of. Many fighting games are 1v1 (Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat). I find that deathmatch in FPSs work well solo (CoD, Counter Strike, Battlefield, Quake live).

Sorry, should have mentioned in the OP. I enjoy most things, anything sort of fast paced, like FPS games, or fighting games. Some of my best gaming memories used to be playing halo 3 online, the FFA playlists in that were a blast.Things along those lines would be great.

Yup, Quake, Unreal Tournament and stuff like that are great to play on your own.

If there's a significant amount of players on PC, then Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare had an anonymous "Combat Readiness" mode where chat is disabled, you don't know the names of those you're playing with or against, so even if you do mess up, nobody cares or knows. No idea if it's been in other COD games or will be in the next one, but I sure appreciate what they were going for with that mode.

There's more people playing World at War on PC than there is AW. Although if it has bots then you could just play with bots OP? CSGO has bots, I often play vs them to get my CSGO itch scratched if I don't wanna deal with assholes/dodgy router.

When my anxiety and agoraphobia were at their worst, I played a lot of TF2 on 32 player servers. People generally don't care what you're up to if you're a sniper or scout. I mainly played as a medic, and I did get called out sometimes for ubering the wrong person or whatever. That didn't feel great. But I survived.

I also played a lot of WoW. I know they're not very fast-paced, but MMOs do give you the option of playing solo to advance your character when you don't feel like grouping up for a dungeon or raid. WoW in particular has a Raid Finder that deposits you and 24 other nobodies in a toned-down version of a Raid. So you can still gear out your character and experience the spectacle of the raid without feeling like there's a spotlight on you.

Best of luck in your mental health journey!!

If you got ArmA 3 the Coop servers might do the trick well, side missions in the server are also possible to be done solo. For faster paced games like Battlefield, CoD or CS:GO just hit the servers with large player counts. Avoid CS:GO's competitive mode as performance pressure there will definitely be at its peak.

Chivalry Medieval Warfare.

Haven't checked in on that game in a while so Idk how much of a community is still there but I had a blast chopping people up in that game.

Heroes of the Storm has good AI bots for playing solo.

How about racing games? Those are really free for all mechanics and fast paced. Most sport games are, so I recommend that.

Most MMOs have team mechanics but are optional and you can still explore a lot on your own.

I haven't tried it myself but Rising Thunder, the fighting game for PC that they did an unfinished of a while back looked like a lot of fun. Don't know if it's still available, I seem to recall it being in open alpha a while back?

Best of luck!

I really like to play Company of Heroes 2 against the AI. The player vs player is just too intense.

Smite has players (or Player with AI allies) vs AI. for all of it's modes. It's Free to play and I think it's worth checking out.