hamchan said:
and you believe Arkham City isn't a big budget game that can cover every component?
Yes you're right, Arkham City is obviously a big budget game, if not probably the biggest thing Warner Bros. has got going for them all year (moreso, I'd say, than FEAR and Mortal Kombat). My point was more that arguing that multiplayer could add a bunch to a game without hampering the single-player and then proceeding to list a bunch of games where the studios were able to afford to hire people and get a budget to make a multiplayer mode without taking away resources from the single-player is kind of disingenuous, as it ignores the fact that there's a ton of games made on ridiculous budget or time constraints that are still expected to be "fully featured games" (SSX: Deadly Descents being a recent example of this) and these resources have to come from somewhere. At best, you get a multiplayer mode that sucks and should never have been made because no one cares (see: most games that have multiplayer nowadays); at worst, you get the example listed below.
hamchan said:
I don't want to start a list war but give me some examples. I've read Condemned 2 and Resident Evil 5 but I want more because in my head, I can think of more games that still had great single player campaigns even with tacked on multiplayer, than games with single player that were bad because of multiplayer.
The Darkness is the perfect example of this for me - a single player that was two steps away from brilliant and a useless, shitty multiplayer mode that they even said in interviews was forced upon them by 2K and required them taking away team members from the single player towards the end of the project. Even if there wasn't much they could've or even would've improved in that single player had they not made that mode, but again, why spend the resources on something that's going to be terrible and serves no better purpose than a bullet point? Tron Evolution and Stranglehold are two other good recent examples.
hamchan said:
I understand that more resources could have gone to the single player if multiplayer didn't exist. I also know that I don't really care to ruminate about how much better a single player could be without the multiplayer as we have no guarantee at all really that it would be.
We also have no guarantee that making a multiplayer mode just because they can results in anything halfway decent or worth the asking price unless you're a whiny bitch who sees that bullet point as a selling point despite the fact that you'll probably end up playing it for less than a week and never again. Yes, I am bringing my biases in here of thinking that most games should either focus on one or the other because you rarely ever get both right when you do (what's up, useless, unfun multiplayer modes in fantastic games like Half-Life, Deus Ex, and even Uncharted 2 to an extent?) and having an apathy for games forcing mandatory co-op experiences into the single-player because Gears of War made it an in-thing, but I feel pretty safe in saying that most times companies shouldn't bother trying to do both unless they're fully willing to hire two full teams to make both things. Out of all the single-player-oriented games we've gotten this generation with multiplayer modes, how many of them have been remotely decent, let alone strong enough to foster sizable communities that have kept them going? The ones you listed (not so coincidentally some of the more expensive games being made) are pretty much it.
But again, we have the all important point that the reason there's no multiplayer is because the team at Rocksteady said it wouldn't work. For some reason, I think I'm going to trust the people being paid to not fuck up the sequel to a game that won a bunch of Game of the Year awards over a bunch of forumgoers - many of whom don't know dick about game design (and that includes me) - who want to play as Robin.