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I just found out about Front Mission 4... and then found out its single player only. There should be an international symbol for 'single player only' like there is for 'biohazard' and 'radiation'... something to avoid. Bad for your health.

Single player games are hard to get right. Unless the story is interesting, involving and not interrupted by constant random encounters (I'm looking at YOU, Final Fantasy) its just no fun. I'm not the kinda guy that wants to play through Blizzards idea of high fantasy to see the pretty CG.

When I buy a game, I want a *system* that I can play with amonst my friends. WC3, single player? How much would that have sold? Everyone would have said things like 'gee, this'd make a great multiplayer game!' Nobody wants a single campaign for anything; multi is where replay value is at. Particularly since single player campaigns always cheat, spawn new enemies, have little continuity between maps, fail you on stupid objectives, etc. I want to be able to play in a free, multi environment, where its just the players and the game system, and not the designers idea of fantasy/scifi/star trek or whatever.

So Front Mission 4 is single only. It looks like its got a great real time 3d engine, almost certainly got its mech-customising thing, guns, explosions, all the good stuff. But whats the point? Why get the Elite Wanzer Power Fist when all you're going to do is fight harder enemies next level anyway? It'd be like playing Diablo single your whole life; your +5/+5 Sword of Satan isn't very impressive, since noone else can experience it. And once the story is done, why go back? It'll always be the same. The older FMs had a 'skirmish' mode, but no multi. FM4 could finally break my embarrassing Armoured Core addiction if it was multi... but alas...

Its a huge waste of what appears to be an excellent mech battle system. Are they deliberatly staying away from Mechwarriors territory in the multiplay arena?

Eh, suck it up. The biggest crime against humanity a game could commit is shifting focus away from the Single Player. Multiplayer is trapped in the doldrums right now, anyway... we need to get higher bandwidth networks in place, in my opinion, before Multiplayer can get anywhere near as fun as a well-designed Single Player game can be.

What he said. Single player is more fun because the computer doesn't use the map hack.

Eh...given Square limited experience with Mutli?

I rather trust them with Single far more.

Stark, quit whining, you little pussy. There is a plethora of games with multiplayer, and several whose main focus is the multiplayer experience. I for one would like to see more games which focus on a good singleplayer experience. (Or, god forbid, cooperative play a la Doom.)

Uraniun235 wrote:(Or, god forbid, cooperative play a la Doom.)

Say what you will about the original Unreal, the nice thing about it was its coop play. If you get the Old-Time (or whatever... can't think of the name right now) mod for Unreal Tournament, then you can do coop play through the Unreal levels again... only problem is, there's really only one good coop server.

SPOOFE wrote:<snip> we need to get higher bandwidth networks in place, in my opinion, before Multiplayer can get anywhere near as fun as a well-designed Single Player game can be.

Important part being 'well-designed'. Look at Splinter Cell and MGS2; as multi they'd be far more enjoyable and replayable ('playable' in the case of SC). Square's single games don't usually lend themselves towards multiplayage in any case.

My point was that single ONLY is a waste of a game. There should always be a single campaign or three (although the tutorial levels and tiered units and capabilities is the weakest design aspect in these campaigns), but anything from Thief to Planescape would be better if you could have a bash with a couple of mates. Spending years creating an engine to tell one story strikes me as a waste.

Stark wrote:My point was that single ONLY is a waste of a game. There should always be a single campaign or three (although the tutorial levels and tiered units and capabilities is the weakest design aspect in these campaigns), but anything from Thief to Planescape would be better if you could have a bash with a couple of mates. Spending years creating an engine to tell one story strikes me as a waste.

No, it isn't - not if you're like me, who for the longest time couldn't play multi due to a) not having an internet connection or b) not having the best possible machine to run it. Single player games aren't a waste if you just want to chill out for a couple hours by yourself - it beats playing solitaire or free cell (*shudder*). That said, some games *do* gel both single and multi quite successfully (I'm looking at you, StarCraft... and you as well, TA ), but I've also had fun playing Kotor and Galactic Civilisations - games which were designed from the ground up to be single player.

Crayz9000 wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:(Or, god forbid, cooperative play a la Doom.)

Say what you will about the original Unreal, the nice thing about it was its coop play. If you get the Old-Time (or whatever... can't think of the name right now) mod for Unreal Tournament, then you can do coop play through the Unreal levels again... only problem is, there's really only one good coop server.

I like coop Halo. Its good to have a gunner in the Maw.

Uraniun235 wrote:Stark, quit whining, you little pussy. There is a plethora of games with multiplayer, and several whose main focus is the multiplayer experience. I for one would like to see more games which focus on a good singleplayer experience. (Or, god forbid, cooperative play a la Doom.)

Cooperative play without multi support? I agree that any game is improved by letting others play with you (indeed, thats my whole point), but its a shame to play an engine for only 10-12 hours to finish it, instead of playing hour-long games frequently with your friends. Unless they're like KOTOR and the better FF's, games like that have staying power (it took me 84 hours to beat FF7 the first time, and I didn't really want to look at another fight after that).

Every time I play an enjoyable console game, I find myself wondering about all the ways a proper LAN environment would make the game better (like Dynasty Warriors). System Shock 2 was heaps of fun (although the late game basically broke the character growth engine), but once it was finished I never played it again until the coop patch came out. Without extra maps, or a randomisation of the story elements, there's no reason to go back, and thats a shame, because it was a great experience. So don't get the impression I'm SP bashing, but there are many games I'd love to play MORE, instead of there being an 'end'.

Rogue 9 wrote:I like coop Halo. Its good to have a gunner in the Maw.

Thing about coop UT is that the levels were tweaked to make it incredibly harder than the original. Basically, if you don't have a large group of coop players, you're going to spend a lot of time respawning.

Crayz9000 wrote:Thing about coop UT is that the levels were tweaked to make it incredibly harder than the original. Basically, if you don't have a large group of coop players, you're going to spend a lot of time respawning.

Alot of games handle originally-single-levels-now-coop issue badly. In system shock2, you suddenly can die as much as you want (it used to be a save-based game) and you just appear at the entrance to the map area with 30% health. This is weak, and makes the game a cakewalk. In Halo, I hear P2 is less important than P1 in some way, and can get teleported when they move too far away from P1 etc.

Don't get me wrong. The coop Unreal levels are still fun to play. They're just incredibly hard. In the SkySpire level, for example, there are pupae everywhere, gasbags where you'd least expect them, and in general those are a pain to get through. In the spaceport level, there's a giant tentacle which fires nuclear bursts and takes almost a half-hour to kill (this being under constant minigun, rocket launcher and ASMD bombardment). In other levels, you run into not just isolated groups of Skaarj and Krall soldiers, but entire freaking armies of them.

Bots make life fun. You can shoot them, run them off cliffs, dress them up in any dumb outfit, give them vastly inferior weapons while you run around like God with a Gun...

Unreal Tournament single player is like having a group of humble, flexibly competent eunuchs as your teammates.

Stark wrote:I just found out about Front Mission 4... and then found out its single player only. There should be an international symbol for 'single player only' like there is for 'biohazard' and 'radiation'... something to avoid. Bad for your health.

Stark wrote:So don't get the impression I'm SP bashing,

*looks at title* Now what would make us think that?

And why do you sound like you're suprised FM4 was single player? Never played or seen 1-3?

People assuming that games should have a multiplayer option is what's wrong with the gaming world right now.

Muti? Some games are terrible for muti.

I probably wouldn't want to play SMAC/civilization in muti, that is for sure. I'm probably never going to be committed enough to play PBEM that last a good portion of a year while waiting for turns and being demaded turns. Hot-seat will probably make me scream "I WANNA MOVE ALL MY 300 SETTLERS" over and over, so that is out.

Secondly, in any stealth games, single player is really the only place to do it. I mean Thief mutiplayer wouldn't even make sense and having mutiple people run around (probably bunnyhopping as well) is simply silly in a stealth game. There is no reason to send five man to steal something if one can do it.

Well, unless you people play MGS and Thief like Quake, I don't see why mutiplayer fits. There are other games for muti anyway.

So what if the replay value is not that high. If you enjoyed the first time, it is enough.

Though FM muti would be fun though..... (excluding FM2-Gun Hazard which should be single only)

Single player only games can be good too, take Max Payne for instance. Because of bullet time, multiplayer becomes very hard to implement (unless you did it without bullet time, but that's part of the MP experience), but the single player game is solid. On top of that, there's a healthy mod community offering shit loads of stuff, such as new skins, new weapons, new levels, martial arts and partially completed total conversions.

Crayz9000 wrote:

Rogue 9 wrote:I like coop Halo. Its good to have a gunner in the Maw.

Thing about coop UT is that the levels were tweaked to make it incredibly harder than the original. Basically, if you don't have a large group of coop players, you're going to spend a lot of time respawning.

I would never consider playing Halo coop on anything less than Hard. It just makes it cheesy to take Normal (or Easy, though I don't even do that single player) with a partner. Especially in the Silent Cartographer where you can each grab a Warthog and get a crew of Marines. Man, I love that level.

Because of bullet time, multiplayer becomes very hard to implement

I've been thinking of a massive multiplayer (ironically, given the topic of this thread) game, set in a sort of "dreamscape" environment, where, during battles, characters generate a sort of "bullet time" bubble... where time slows down locally. So, to outside observers, they would see the two people fighting in slo-mo while they, themselves, remain realtime... entering the bubble, however, brings you into the bullet time frame, as well.

It's really the only way I could possibly conceive of implementing this feature, and the environment I thought of (sort of mystical, Jedi-knightish kinda shit) gives way to that, coincidentally.

Splinter Cell 2 is going to have a sort of stealth multiplayer...

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Splinter Cell 2 is going to have a sort of stealth multiplayer...

Sort of 'stealth' multiplayer or sort of stealth 'multiplayer'? I was under the impression it was multi all over

And The Specialists for Half Life is why I don't want to play Max Payne 2: Max Payne 2 looks the shit, but its got no multi. TS does all the Max Payne bullet-time stuff, has more guns, kung-fu, and other gun-fu movie stuff. And it all works multi (the slowdowns and remote slowdowns have an area effect, which is blocked by walls etc. It works very well). So I don't want to pay $A100 to play a game that I'll get sick of before the end (like MP1) when I can do all the kewlness in TS.

SAMAS wrote:And why do you sound like you're suprised FM4 was single player? Never played or seen 1-3?

I played FM3 on PS. And I wanted to play my team against my friends team. I never finished it, because the story didn't interest me and I didn't see the point of upgrading my mechs just to fight thru the story. Actually, as soon as James said 'hey wouldn't it be cool if we could use my mechs against yours in the skirmish thing' I couldn't get the idea out of my head.

SWPIGWANG wrote:Secondly, in any stealth games, single player is really the only place to do it. I mean Thief mutiplayer wouldn't even make sense and having mutiple people run around (probably bunnyhopping as well) is simply silly in a stealth game. There is no reason to send five man to steal something if one can do it.

I *have* a multiplayer Thief-style mod. It's fun; guards vs thieves. True, its really just CS with different weapons, but its fun to sneak around and clonk people on the head

Your specific complaints, ie bunnyhopping and such, are really problems with particular MP games, not MP. The issues with turn-based are fair; but turn based can be made (slow)real time with scripting to spread the workload.

@Slartibartfast - In alot of cases you're correct. But consider, for instance, that FM4 is a turn based, tile based game. Implementing the 'skirmish against AI' module with multi (even 2P) I wouldn't imagine would be hard.