| Shiken said:
Enter Smash, a fighter with 72 characters, a ton of stages, and a massive single player mode, and we see sales not only shattered, but systems flying off of store shelves. Likewise we see the best Dragonball game released in a long time with Dragonball FighterZ, and the game sells far better than projected across all platforms as well. Even when you look at the side of things outside of what we see on Nintendo...
God of War Horizon Zero Dawn Assassin's Creed ORIGINS Red Dead Redemption 2 Spiderman
All of these games have either far surpassed sales expectations, or have just outright dominated their respective release windows. Once again, score one for complete retail gaming experiences. What this does is give gamers a bit of reassurance that there will still be a healthy balance between both single player and multiplayer experiences in the future, as the numbers do not lie. It even adds a bit of hope that multiplayer strategies may improve as well. After all, a company can only lose money for so long before they are forced to try something different. |
Assassin's Creed has microtransactions and the game is balanced accordingly so that it's a slog to get through if you don't use them. It doesn't deserve to be listed alongside the others on that list. RDR2 had a shitty online economy, and online that wasn't available right away, so not really a "complete retail gaming experience" either. I never was crazy about GoW as a franchise, but at least it didn't pull that kind of shit. GoW deserved that GOTY award over RDR2 for that alone. You mention "a bit of hope" for multiplayer, but of your non-Nintendo list, only RDR2 had multiplayer, and as I noted, it was pretty flawed. Of your Nintendo games, all but one feature multiplayer, and none of them ruin it with microtransactions or games that feel incomplete out of the box. Nintendo is making good single player and multiplayer games, and single player games with multiplayer features, and vice versa, all feeling like "complete retail gaming experiences" that don't water down the gameplay, cut content that should have been included and sell it as DLC, or make the games a miserable grind if you don't use microtransactions. The multiplayer games usually have something to do by yourself if you prefer the single player part, and the single player experiences offer some sort of multiplayer option that feels neither overbearing nor tacked on, but rather appropriate for what the game is. There's your healthy balance between single player and multiplayer. The rest of the industry has shown no signs of having learned this lesson. Multiplayer games are all lousy with microtransactions, and many single player games are as well. The single player games that are any good haven't even tried to incorporate multiplayer in any way, not through coop, not through a competitive mode, not even with online. Only RDR2 had one, not at launch, and again, had to ruin it by making the economy shitty so people would pay for microtransactions. Multiplayer games don't have single player features even when it would make sense to or the playerbase is used to it, like with the recent COD. I see increasing hope that good single player experiences will be made by non-Nintendo publishers, but no such hope for multiplayer yet, and no hope for games that balance single player and multiplayer well, or at least at a similar quality as the Nintendo games you mentioned. I'll take the new single player experiences though, that's certainly good news, as I tend to prefer that anyway.
