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Zkuq on 22 February 2014
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Danman27 said:
Zkuq said:

No, we're not assuming so. You said you don't see why people don't play both SP and MP and I provided some reasons why people might not want to play MP or why people might strongly prefer SP. And yes, people do have the right to say 'good' whenever they hear a game has no MP. Whether it's actually good or not is debatable but they definitely have the right to say so. And I don't know where you've been but I've definitely heard enough dissing of SP here. Call of Duty would probably be a good example of that: "I don't see why anyone would play CoD for SP." And the fact is, 'great' is a very subjective word in this case so you can't just say that both SP and MP are great and expect people to think the same way as you do - they have the right to disagree. Of course similarly everyone has the right to not like SP and say it aloud.

You're support was people don't want to play tacked on MP. That suggests that you think all MP is tacked on. When I say people don't have the right, I'm pointing out a double standard. Whenever I see a dev announce that a game doesn't have an MP mode, many comments say "good." Or when a game does have it, people get pissed off. People, for some reason, are under the impression that every new multiplayer is just tacked on. I'm not saying tacked on multiplayer isn't stupid, I'm saying that the assumption that every new multiplayer is tacked on is even dumber. If a game said they were taking away the single player component, I don't think every comment would be like "it was just tacked on anyway" except in the case of battlefield and maybe COD.

No, my main point wasn't that people don't want to play tacked-on MP. It was a big thing because most MP experiences these days offer nothing special so it obviously kills a lot of MP possibilities for people. In a way, there's relatively few proper MP modes these days. But I also provided other reasons! For example, people might simply not like the competitive aspect of MP, and that aspect is often present even in co-op MP.

People say 'good' when it's announced that a game doesn't have MP because it means the devs can fully focus their resources on making better SP when they think the MP mode would have been tacked on anyway. For the same reason people might want to say the same thing about SP, which did indeed happen quite a bit with the Battlefield games. The thing is, though, that SP is usually a safer and easier choice when developing a game. It's easier to create the rules for the game when you don't constantly have to worry about balance (and thus you can express your creativity more freely), and it's safer in the sense that multiplayer games have a tendency to die after a while so unless you can create a huge hit, the game's not going to give you a lot of money for long. I suspect that's a big reason why SP mode is still the main mode for many games even though online features have gained popularity in the recent years.