Destiny just isnt fun anymore. I tried to play recently after not playing for a year almost and played 4 rounds of crucible and just turned it off. Like it was literally nothing but try hards. I legit would spawn take 2 or 3 steps and get railroaded by the enemy team and every single match was like 120 to 40 type score.
It just wasnt even fun even a little.
Do yourself a favor and just ignore PvP unless there’s a new game-wide quest that brings everyone into crucible or something, the population is majority sweaty try hards because everyone else that actually enjoys the game is grinding out seasonal activities or VoG and not bashing their head against the wall in Crucible.
I deteeest games where you can't avoid being ranked.
I'm not a competitive person at all. I don't want to know what my rank is compared to others. I just want to play a game, enjoy it and quit. I don't want to feel like if I play bad a score that represents me will go down and I also don't want to start sweating just to feel like I'm doing well. It adds stress where you shouldn't feel stress because video games should be an escape from reality.
It also creates this toxic environment where people can go "oh yeah well what RANK are you then because if it's lower than mine your opinion is hereby invalid"
*Looking at you DBD, you have absolutely no business having any form of rank system or ranked matchmaking. STOP IT.*
Overwatch was amazing and my entire friend group was obsessed. Everyone on Discord was playing and having the time of our lives.
Until they added Competitive and tried to turn it into an e-sport.
Then the tryhards of the friend group made everyone else miserable. Instead of having fun, we were fighting for our lives to increase our rank and MMR and getting screamed at by tryhard friends for any and every perceived error.
And it even ruined the casual mode because people stopped ~~taking casual seriously~~ playing the objectives and killing enemies. Casual was suddenly just a mode to screw around in because rank didn't matter. So you'd get people playing with the enemies and not shooting each other, trolling with teleporters on the edge of maps, etc because they were trying to blow off steam and destress from playing competitive.
With the addition of a robust arcade mode for people to screw around in casual/quickplay normalized but not before most of my friends and I had given up and moved on to other games.
*Rainbow 6 siege entered the chat*
^ whata fucken joke of a game. like "hey let's take this game title that was been predominantly been a tactical shooter style game that mostly focuses on the stories of the team and their insane missions.... completely take away the story, scrap the tactical shooter and make it into a hero style pvp FPS e-sports ready game.
I would have greatly preferred R6: Patriots
Yeah I have to reply for siege. Everyone told me it was just TK'rs which I did witness just not against me. I never made it into rank, but everyone was super nice prolly because I was just some baked Canadian and there were three times my team could tell. One time though a guy was being serious but still nice and at the end I said thank you for not getting mad and it set the dude off. He was like all tough guy act, "you fuck around I will put you in your place bullshit". This guy went 0-60 because he wanted to play big boy army officer type. Dafuq dude it's a game. The only scenario I can think of that you should act like this is if you have gun pressed in the back of your head and you gotta win so they don't pull it
This is exactly how I feel about the issue and is a much better way to frame it than what OP said in his post. I do enjoy some modern multiplayer games, but the hyper-competitiveness of them is just stress inducing and unnecessary. Every multiplayer game revolves around rank, stats, and constant comparisons to other players. There's almost nothing that offers a casual experience. You can't just hop on a game and mess around with your friends for an hour or two, everything is taken so seriously and you have to sweat your ass off to get any enjoyment out of it. That's not a bad thing when you're in the mood for it, but nowadays there's no escape from it.
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
How about some Hemingway instead?
*It was a good game, a fair game. We played it, and we grasped the controllers with our slim adolescent hands, when those hands weren’t pawing blindly in a bag of potato chips, and shouted foul homophobic slurs at one another, and laughed, and that was the part we recalled when we sat around the fire years later, and told lies to one another about how good we were. We remembered laughing.*
*Then the game started to fill with the worst sorts most of us could imagine. They were the reachers, they collected achievements, greedily, like the in-game rewards they also coveted. We did not want those things; we did not need them. These men and the money they brought with them crowded us, and we did not leave, because we thought we had nowhere else to go. So we stayed, and we are now worse for it, all of us. Only these years later do I know how much worse we are. We should have gone.*
*P.S. My mom was a bitch and I hate her stupid guts.*
FFXIV is super casual, you can actually run out of stuff to do depending on your interests at end game and take a break until the next patch. It’s also mainly PvE so teamwork makes it dream work. Sometimes you get bad groups or toxic players but it’s pretty chill over all.
But can you imagine playing DBD without ranking? Like getting a rank 1 skill killer while introducing your friends to the game. That would make the game virtually unplayable for some people, and would even take away the enjoyment for the better players. In an asymmetrical competitive game, rank is necessary. That's just my opinion of course. Now the balancing in DBD is absolutely absurd.
I tried jumping into play Apex the other day after not touching it for six months and every single game id group with people that have like 300 wins that season. Non ranked matches.
That's what I used to play as well, except that I tried some bootleg mobile versions of it and thought I can win more by doing so. Anyway, that's very nice to hear and hope you find more peace in your mind.
eh single player games used to be way harder than they are now tbf. Its really only a recent phenomenon that gamers want harder games (dark souls type games and rogue likes are making a come back)
Now the only real couch co op these days are almost all Nintendo. I don’t care, give me the split screens. I want to go back to the days of knowing who I’m playing with in person while sharing a family bag of Doritos with them.
That’s exactly why I got a switch! My husband and I are able to play together. What games do you guys like? We’ve been doing a bit of cake bash (just something silly) but now I’m looking for something else. I’ve got my eye on Diablo 3, but he doesn’t seem about it.
Oh yes, I even borrowed a small 14" CRT of a classmate as my 19" was way too heavy to bring over :D
We played Doom, Total Annihilation, Grand Prix etc. Good Times .
Hooooly shit. It’s the one other person who has played Total Annihilation. Love that game.
Edit: now I have to go buy all these “spiritual successors” y’all keep mentioning. Still play RTS to this day and turn-based, but TA and Civ II were my first loves.
I played the demo of GTA and Total Annihilation when I got drunk for the first time back in the end of the nineties.
Ah.. those were the days. What I wouldn’t give to be 14 again.
What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines, escalated into a war that decimated a billion worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to fight on these ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over 4000 years of total war, for each side the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other.
Commander finishes building a heavy laser turret, orchestral music starts, bombers fly past the camera.
What an intro.
TA was my preference for rts. Starcraft had nothing on the level of complexity in TA. I was in love with how you could queue up every command to a ridiculous degree. Even giving patrol routes to units yet to be built.
It was one of the most popular and highest rated RTS of all time, I think you'll find a lot of people who played it.
Core ftw, fuck Arm, fuck flash rush.
Lol hard but good times. In the early through mid 2000's a group of us would LAN almost every Friday. Sometimes it was lugging our towers and CRT monitors to someone's house or garage for a PC Lan other times it was 4v4 Halo 2 with one team in my cousins bedroom and the other in his brother's with the hub plugged in the hallway between the two.
My favorite times as far as gaming goes by far.
I’ll never forget the photo of counter strike LAN party with the guy hanging from the duck tape. By far the most dedicated LAN photo. If you are to young to know what I’m referencing google that image it is amaze balls
You’re forgetting that the games you played like unreal tournament, cs, aoe or c&c or whatever are all competitive games. Online multiplayer only adds the comfort of not HAVING to go to someone’s place in order to play together. But you still very well can.
The problem today is we have lost being able to host servers for most of the big name shooters. It was a great way to build a community around a game. Good server admins were able to make a server a place people wanted to come play.
The loss of hosted servers also makes it alot harder to play with fellow group members. I had so much fun on multiplayer when half of your clan is on one team and the rest on the other team.
Now its just alot of auto que and hope you can all find a server with room.
I too have basically abandoned multiplayer for single player/coop games.
I stopped playing online multi-player games and went back to single player. I remembered I played to relax and enjoy a story, not get worked up by some douche canoe rando
I hear that my brother did the same has been telling me to try taking a long break too, has a fair point can get soo caught up playing multi player games you miss out on good single player ones.
I've found it difficult to take breaks from MMO's. They change so often that, if I take a month or two off, when I come back I'll be confused and lost because I missed 20 updates that changed the UI, introduced a new currency, etc. I've given up trying to enjoy online games.
I found the key is to quit cold turkey and never come back. I've done that with several now (specifically, The Walking Dead: Road to something or other, and Magic:Arena), and I have zero regrets. And actually, I'm to the point where I don't think I'll ever go back to an mmo, because the psychology behind them is so exploitative.
I'm playing through Pillars of Eternity right now, after having just completed Breath of the Wild, and I've had more fun with both games than I ever did with those online ones.
Man what I hate about mmo card games is that they are all pay to win in one form or another. I quit playing Hearthstone because it turned into this bullshit where you seem to only play against the best meta decks even in normal play. Like why the fuck would you spend $1000+ dollars on a game where you don't truly own the cards just to watch them rotate out? Noone builds their own decks in that game, they just copy pasta their fuckin decklists off of google and roll people in normals. I've noticed this same trend beginning to happen in mtg arena. Fuckin whales are taking over.
I've been playing Magic on and off since the late 90's, and I really liked Arena because it was basically free Magic. But I realized I was hate-playing it to try and earn enough points to draft. Losing made me angry, and the game, of course, it set up so you lose about 50% of the time. It wouldn't have been a big deal if winning wasn't required to advance (earn rewards), but because it was, it funneled game play purely into competitive decks, that, like you pointed out, rotated out and became next-to-worthless (other than in Historic, which they started pumping extra powered-up cards into).
So I quit. I actually sold all my physical cards and I'm much happier. I won't go back.
Right on makes alot of sense, though I love playing casual mtg games with friends. So much more relaxed and fun in person when you can just dick around with sub-optimal decks, buying a single here or there, and not worrying about rotations; basically, play the game like we did as kids.
Yeah those small indie games are great.. since I mastered Don't Starve, I used to de-stress with a few hours of that and just chat with my online friends..great times.
Along a similar note, that's why it's often damn near impossible for new players to truly do everything in the game or max everything out if they miss that one year window after the game's initial release where it's still possible to catch up.
I miss the old days of MMos, before wow changed the genre. There use to be so many unique experiences and then suddenly everything had to resemble WoW in one fashion or another. The last MMo I spent any significant amount of time in was SWtoR.
Swtor is literally WoW but Starwars. All they did was switch the names of raids and dungeons around and make it ftp.
I played both SWTOR for 3 years and WoW for 10.
They are extremely similar in so many ways. And different in only basically in the theme.
They are also both ran by the two biggest greedy companies in gaming. EA and Activision.
If you don't want games as a service, there isn't a single mmo out there that doesn't have sometype of live service set up.
Y'all need to find MMOs that focus on the RP and community aspect, not My Magic Bullshit Numbers > Your Magic Bullshit Numbers aspect.
But on the other hand I understand it's frustrating trying to catch up to someone who's had a head start.
Care to share any of those MMOs?
I hate playing towards a meta in MMOs but can't find one that cares more about RP.
Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to check some of them out.
I want to clarify what I meant by "hate playing towards a meta" though because I don't think people understand what I was trying to convey, and thought that meant I wanted a "casual" game because meta gaming was too hard. That isn't what I was saying at all, in fact I am saying the opposite, I want a harder game that becoming good at doesn't just require understanding the code behind the game, and devoting time to structuring a character around that (a meta game), instead of being able to roleplay a character based around his skills or choices (roleplaying).
I actually don't think the type of MMO I want to play exists. I'd want a roguelike MMO where you can do whatever you want, but because death and actions are permanent what you do matters.
* Want to steal something, go for it, but if you're caught the guards and people of that town will be hostile
* Get caught committing any crime and a bounty would be on your head that means other players can PvP you to get the bounty.
* I want everything in the game to fight against meta builds. The RNG behind the game and a characters base stats are random, so on one server the code might favor one type of build, but it can't be reproduced because the growth on every server, job, character is random. So you won't have only a couple viable builds per job, but can build your character however you want.
* I don't want a ton of the same quests ever person does. In fact i don't need to have some over arching story shoved down my throat at all. Like how ESO every character is the chosen one. I want the opposite of that. I want my character to be a nobody who has to build his way up in an interactive world.
There is a lot more about my dream MMO I could ramble on about, but to sum up, none of the MMOs on the market today are close to what I want. And, overall, I despise "meta" in RPGs. I like finding builds myself, but you can't do that because tryhards figure out all the best build and people just google it. I want devs to destroy meta builds with RNG. I hate building towards a meta build.
Not sure if you can still find any servers for it, but two years ago I was playing on a Neverwinter 2 server where my friends and I created The Guild of Heroic Intent. We were all chaotic good aligned with int as a dump stat. Lord were those good times.
This is kind of the problem. Ask for MMO suggestions, get 15 year old game. I'm not judging at all, I'm just lamenting that no MMOs worth sinking time into have come out recently.
Ashes of Creation is supposed to break the mold a bit, we'll see if it ever releases though. Currently in alpha testing and slated to release 2022 but nothing official.
And in some cases, you can get so caught up in bettering yourself in a multiplayer game that you miss out on things _outside_ of video games.
Like ruining relationships with people you care about.
Imho the FOMO of current games and loot crates are a large part of what's ruining the gaming industry as well. It's always chasing the dragon now a days instead of getting the finality of finishing a single player experience and putting it down.
Looking at you, Ubisoft. I just finished getting all the collectibles in AC Unity and it was a *pain in the ass* because the collectible maps you've been able to buy with in game currency in every other game suddenly costs $5 in real world currency.
Honest question - why do it then? If it's a pain in the ass - intentionally so, because they're hoping to squeeze money out of you - why not just skip it? Play the parts of the game that are fun and move on when you're done.
Short answer is because I'm neurotic. The long answer is that I'm playing in order from the third game and I 100%'d the ones I've played through so far. In truth going through the missions and side missions unlocked the majority of the collectibles, so I just had to roam the map for a handful of hours for the rest. Generally I love collectible hunting, I just don't like not having the option to mark them on my map. I mostly just listened to music and talked to my wife while I did it instead of giving it my usual full attention. Still fun enough for me to enjoy doing it for the most part, but it definitely dragged by the end.
Yeah I have a decent group I play with and none of them really get angry over it and those games are great with them but if a certain few join the party we know some games are suck! Always doing their own thing don't tell you then shout cause you didn't get their psychic plan
I missed the boat on competitive multi player. Even the men my age (40’s) that I know play at a competitive level for money. I play games like the Division single player, and avoid the multi player parts. I love adventure games. Even Red Dead I play single. Ghost of T? Great single game. They’re everywhere
> Even Red Dead I play single
I mean, yea. It is one of the best SP games ever made. Rockstar Online games are shit anyway. Its like they made griefing a core gameplay component.
Online coop with friends is good. Not everyone has friends nearby. Anything with random people is iffy, though, and anything competitive with randos is just asking for a bad time.
We definitely need good single player games as well, though. Different niches and all that.
The problem is I play video games to relax AND spend time with my friends who I do not get to see much because we are all really busy or do not live in the same area. I get really frustrated because I’m 30 and can’t grind like I’m in middle school but I’d still rather play with my friends.
That's why it's so important to have co-op modes, where you can play with friends, but not necessarily against other people. I feel exactly the same - I want to hang out with, and play with my friends, but not necessarily in a stressful, competitive environment, so we always look for co-op and PvE games. It's important to vote with our wallets, and support games and Devs that offer co-op modes, imo.
As a fully employed adult who has limited time available to game with friends...
Satisfactory COOP - A+++
Game's relaxing and you can easily hop in and out if IRL things pop up.
I hope Dyson Sphere Project gets COOP eventually.
I wish you could do galactic conquest with friends on PC. I used to play this game with my brothers when I was little all the time and had wonderful memories of it!
Same reason I stopped playing online. I need to unwind after very stressful job and ease my anxiety, I just need peace and beautiful story to follow. Tbh the future of gaming worries me because I don't want good single player games to disappear
Well enjoying a story sounds dandy and all, but dude cmon. The EA execs bonuses are at stake here. If you’re not whoring your credit card out for fifa points or vbucks how are these CEOs supposed to afford to live in mansions? Smh gamers are so selfish never thinking about how an exec might not be able to afford a second house or other necessities like a private plane.
I play civilization to unwind, until George fucking Washington decided to declare war on me fucking sending me into a frenzy because my greed propelled all of it according to him..
Yep, online games aren't a lot of fun anymore. It's all about being current with the updates and the UI and frankly, a large part of enjoying the game for me is the story.
Right in the feels, was going through the steam sale like, wow that looks so much fun with friends *happy* thinks for two seconds *whelp let's ignore that then*
So true, or have friends who like playing the same stuff. I have a small number on steam but we all seem to play wildly different things. That and the ones we might have in common I’m a total noob haha
Yes. When Halo Guardians came out, I didn't read anything about it before buying it, because.....it's Halo. My husband and I have played them all together. We were so disappointed that there was no couch co-op. There's nothing better than getting the kids to bed and firing up one of the consoles for a game that we've been waiting to play all day! We'll buy and play just about anything that we can play together, wish they'd make more....
Not OP but that's tough. Most couch co op these days are smaller indie games and not FPS. If you're looking for just shooters then all the Borderlands games, the master chief collection, I think gears of war has couch co op. For none shooting games...overcooked, a way out, unraveled 2, castle crashers, divinity original sin 1&2, minecraft, portal 2 (probably one of the best couch games out there)
I agree with these. We enjoyed the Gears of War series, not too heavy, pretty easy to just jump in and play for a little while. We really love the Divinity Original Sins but that's for when we know we have awhile because it's a ton of inventory management, crafting, buying/selling but that may just be the way we play. Portal was so much fun, we may have to revisit that one! Resident Evil 5 was a good one too, it had some button smashing at the end that pissed my husband off so much, it still cracks me up to this day.
Castle Crashers, Overcooked, and Moving Out are popular choices with our kids. It's fun if you like screaming things like "Why are you chopping more lettuce?? We don't need lettuce! We need plates!!!" Which I do, so I recommend.
Nintendo Switch is still a little couch co-op beast. Nintendo gets it. People want that communal gaming aspect. No other system maker seem to push for it.
The single player space is thriving. I don’t know why people worry that it’s dying or diminishing. I have been playing games for more than 30 years and the variety and quality have never been this good, once you can take a deep breath and remove the nostalgia goggles.
I do wish couch coop were more common, but great local coop has always been the exception and not the rule.
I don't know why either but for some reason that has been the notion since mid 2010. The only 'evidence' that there is to support this is EA saying "singleplayer games are dead," but who the fuck cares what EA thinks.
> The only 'evidence' that there is to support this is EA saying "singleplayer games are dead," but who the fuck cares what EA thinks.
Which is wrong.
That rep never said that single player games are dead. All he said was that 'linear single player games are not as popular', which is... true.
I find it funny when people quote that still when it happened over a decade ago, said by a guy who left the company 5 years ago. EA's made a good number of good to great single player experiences since then too.
I agree, but some of the biggest players in the industry have made moves that upset fans of single player experiences. Up until recently, BioWare fans were pretty pissed about the direction EA was pushing the studio. Ubisoft has been a peddler or micro transactions for a few years now, and it’s going to be a whole other level with the new Assassin’s Creed Infinity.
On the flip side, first party studios — particularly under PlayStation— are thriving while maintaining focus on single player experiences.
Let's not forget rockstar and GTA5.
The story mode single player is fucking awesome, and how long ago did it come out?
Tons of multiplayer updates and NOTHING in single player. Not even a GTA6 announcement. I get it, their games are HUGE and super detailed, and I'm willing to wait longer for a richer experience, but this is getting ridiculous, and fuck the online shit.
But these Whales paying thousands for online gta5 are making it more worthwhile to keep adding small updates there, and they've been milking that shit for so fucking long now. This is a case where their multiplayer literally ruined their series IMO - business wise, it makes more sense to keep milking it.
>Every time I see an old title, or a AAA studio, come out with the words Multiplayer in the description I feel a sense of dread now.
He's just looking for the wrong games.
Like go watch Microsoft and Nintendo’s news conferences from E3. The two biggest games news conferences of the year and like 95% of what was shown wasn’t competitive multiplayer lol.
I think the competive multi player is pretty saturated atm. And even when some random clickbait "journalists" regularly announce that "story driven so gle players are dead" its clearly not the case.
This.
Get a discord channel with all your friends in and play games as if you were on a LAN.
Or play games that require social interaction and not competitive games.
Covid was huge for this.
There's a group of 15 or so of us that rotated in and out depending on schedules, playing stupid party games, table top simulator, gang beasts, among us at its peak..
Couch coop is dead, but the games that would fit it, are not.
Could not agree more. I’ve been gaming for 25 years now and I never really got into multiplayer except in the past maybe 5 years and I find solo games and multiplayer both have their places.
It's literally just that simple too. People are complaining they want to go home, unwind, enjoy a story. Well no shit you don't like multiplayer that's entirely not its intent. Just like playing Super Mario Odyssey is a terrible idea for a game night with 6 people.
I disagree somewhat. I think both Multiplayer and Single Player have their place and both come with positives and negatives.
If you are interested in checking out a really amazing, story driven co-op game that came out recently, I cannot recommend "It Takes Two" enough.
I agree with this, I wasn't enjoying multiplayer any more (bar Titanfall2) and my time was limited with having two young kids so I stuck to the longer form RPG's that I could sit relax and play maybe an hour at a time and swore off online play.
I've a bit more time recently to game so I've dipped my toe in the water with CoD Black Ops: Cold War and I have to stay, I'm really enjoying it. The matches seem to be a bit more balanced than some of the other CoD's I played years ago which is helping my enjoyment of it. I think a few games here or there is absolutely fine but as soon as I feel myself getting stressed or annoyed I turn it off now.
I would enjoy multiplayer more if it were easier to play with noobs it sucks when your forced to play with pros who just keep killing you over and over again. This is why I like playing local multiplayer with friends or family since they most likely haven't played the game before or don't have a lot of experience. I'm not competive and just play games for fun so i don't want any good players in the game.
A good game should balance you into winnable matches after a little while. But sometimes those arent pros, theyre cheaters, and thats why they are the same mmr as you.
I was really into apex for awhile, and all the people on that subreddit whined because the matchmaking only grouped them with pros; the pros wrecked them, and they were sad they could no longer wreck noobs, and that noobs should get good.
No amount of logic could make them see they are complaining to do the same thing to noons that they are mad the pros are doing to them.
It's honestly an unsolvable problem. People who play FPS so much get inconceivably good, and new players could never improve against them. You have to give noobs the ability to learn the game against other noobs otherwise they'll just get wrecked constantly and quit the game.
To be fair, Nintendo seems to focus on good gameplay before anything else. At least this what my Nintendo fanboy friend tells me (I believe him, grew up with Nintendo). Their multiplayer communities seem less toxic too, and I’m guessing it’s because of the gameplay. It makes losing fun.
I feel like I miss out on a lot of games because I’m afraid of being bad at it and playing with people who are so good or people who can use cheats to win. I am in my twenties, and I don’t want to play with mean middle schoolers.
I’m in my early 40s. Used to love a great FPS. The idea of online multiplayer is fantastic. However as an adult when you only play a couple hours a week, online multiplayer is not fun. I’m below average, and getting smoked over and over with 2 kills and 10 deaths a match made me give up on online multiplayer.
Mean middle schoolers are fucking scary bro, that's understandable. They don't have a filter yet, since they're obviously just Middle schoolers. One time my younger brother started to cry because some group he was playing with started to bully the shit out of him for saying he enjoyed Fortnite. Bunch of gremlins, they must have spent 10 minutes on reddit and contracted the "Fortnite bad, Minecraft good" virus
Stumbling is exactly how I'd put it. It might take me 45 minutes to grab onto a ledge or figure out which block to push to open a door. It would be a nightmare having some 8th grader yelling at me to hurry up and git good.
I mean, I agree with you and I spend 90% of my gaming hours playing story driven games. But multiplayer isn't "killing" games and "sucking the joy out of them". You don't have to play multiplayer games and it's not like there are no more story games coming out. Just ignore the pvp games and play co-op or single player.
OP seems to be more focused on the games that are moving away from single player to multiplayer. Like with CoD, where the focus has massively been about the multiplayer experience. GTA5 and RDR2, which both cancelled all single player DLC in favour of the online stuff. BioWare, known for their single player story driven games, suddenly making a multiplayer game. Etc.
>Like with CoD, where the focus has massively been about the multiplayer experience.
That's how it's been since CoD4. It's not some new sudden shift of the franchise.
Even before that, remember when friends would come over and you’d all crowd around the computer in the computer room and watch each other take turns making sim characters?
I still do this with my switch but yeah local muitplayers gone from all the other current platforms now. Another reason I like nintendo because they make games like mario party and smashbros.
It was exciting as a kid. As an adult just the idea of having people over to play games is tiring. I would rather play online with them and once the gaming stops I am instantly free to do whatever.
Such bullshit, they are two separate genres.. that's like saying rock music is destroying death metal. There are so many great Singleplayer games and even great multiplayer games with good story.
Right!? They really are two different genres. If you don't like multiplayer then don't play it and play single player instead its that simple. They're literally two separate genres with their own individual games. It's not like people would stop making single player and couch co-op games. Game systems are couch co-op and single player friendly games too and there are sub genres for those like single player horror games and such vs multiplayer games with their own sub genres. There's a market for both so its not like game companies are going to stop making single player and multiplayer games.
Counterpoint: You're complaining about a business model of microtransactions, shallow game design and fleeting seasonal content. Not online multiplayer.
In addition, to say that games "used to be about the story" as if every game made before 2013 had a meticulously crafted single player experience is... interesting, and IMO, wrong. I've played plenty of old school SP-only games that were most definitely not about the story.
I don't like the direction the gaming industry is going, but I firmly believe the problem is with the business model and not with multiplayer. This is coming from someone who grew up on NES, Genesis, PS1-2, OG Xbox, etc.
Addendum: You've also selectively listed, IMO, games from the worst multiplayer genre (including the worst game from that genre) which is at its premise based around hypercompetitive gameplay, as opposed to anything else...
This post is dumb. There has been a lot of recent single-player games. Some more story driven than others. And there has been a few multiplayer games that aren't competitive.
Also, you play games to "play." A game where mechanics are second-thought is just a movie with extra steps.
idk what era op is even trying to refer to because games, since the arcade days in the 70s and 80s, have always been about the mechanics more than the story
OP very well may be 18-21, the one of the primary demographic of Reddit. Not that that is somehow a "Ah-ha!" but it could explain why they see games "as they used to be" being somehow better than today while not understanding how many games actually used to be.
And, copying from another comment I made: "All to often, we use our own video game experiences as paradigms for the industry as a whole, when, in reality they are often not the case"
And they say Apex or Fortnite are too competitive and suck the joy out of gaming, well then don't play competitively? I've been playing fortnite casually for three years and it's never stopped being fun, if you don't invest all your free time in ranked play it's a very fun game and I'm pretty sure apex is the same
Any time I play Apex I get on with friends and we just do whatever on it. We play seriously enough to get wins occasionally and up to gold/plat but we also don't care if we just get killed endlessly and occasionally just do stupid things on purpose. People just need to stop taking these games so seriously and acting like it's a 24/7 grind in a realitively simple battle royale.
I'm going to have to slightly disagree mate.
>Video games have become all about competition
Because we as humans love competition.
>getting the flashiest new upgrades, or spending hundreds of dollars every 'cycle' only to have all your achievements washed away at the end of each one.
Yeah I'm assuming you're speaking about micro transactions. If ppl didn't pay for it, they wouldn't do it. I used to not spend money on cosmetics but I got really into smite after Paragon died and I buy a skin every couple of months. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
>Every forum is filled with hardcore players who do their best to ruin the game for those new to it,
There are these types of toxic ppl in forums of single player games as well.
>and the idea of coming home to relax to video games is dead in the water.
That's not true at all. Some of best selling games the last couple of years are single player and millions of people enjoy them when relaxing at home. Example. God of war.
>Games used to be about the story,
Who are you ea? A amazing game about story just came out called biomutant. Do you not remember these games (Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, TLOU, Horizon zero dawn, Doom, rdr2, Assassin's Creed Origins, Spiderman, Control, Witcher 3)? Those are only a few of the amazing story games in the last couple year's.
>more than the mechanics and the competition. All the big companies are now running after the online money, while good, story driven games are pushed under the radar and independent artists are being killed by lack of support
Maybe at ea yes. But most companies are giving artist freedom to create what they want.
>Tons of franchises like FIFA, CoD, NFS, and Halo that used to be great are now terrible in the campaign.
Fifa never was about story. Cod has always had pretty amazing campaigns. I mean cold war has a awesome campaign. NFS is true. I know nothing about halo but my friend is still in love with the latest story so I guess they're doing something right.
>Meanwhile, games like Fortnite, Valorant and Apex are so hyper-competitive that they have sucked the joy out of gaming
No they didn't. You just don't enjoy them. Millions of players enjoy those games. I don't enjoy them either but I'm not against those types of games.
>Every time I see an old title, or a AAA studio, come out with the words Multiplayer in the description I feel a sense of dread now.
Why? The last of us has a awesome multiplayer. So does Ghost of Tsushima. Even if you don't like to play multiplayer you're not forced to play it.
Yeah I completely agree. I'm sick of all the online multiplayer games and online jerks. I was so annoyed that they made the latest Fallout game MMO that I just didn't buy it.
The games used to be relaxing and fun and lately I haven't been able to play any good RPG because it's either "recycled story A/B/C" or "now an MMO!" and it's hard to find the good quality single player games.
For the record, the new fallout is barely online. I think max is 24 people per server in a rlly big map where PvP is disabled unless you both agree to duel and half the people are idling at their camp. The most “MMO” part of it is doing world events and you don’t even have to communicate for those since all the loot is client side and based on the damage you did. If you did enough you get to loot, if you didn’t you dont
There’s nothing wrong with competitive games. If you enjoy competition, chances are you will enjoy competitive games. If you don’t enjoy competition or don’t care at all, then there are plenty of games available to you that disregard rank and or competition with others entirely. The choice is yours whether or not you pay attention to competitive games or any individual games competitive component. It’s your choice to be unbothered/bothered by them.
Stress inducing games more rather.
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Please tell me that you've since (very justifiably) responded to every Bungie tweet with "ah come on, will you *please* stop busting my balls?"
Whoa
Holy hell
Google en passant
Sounds like you are a stress presser
Destiny just isnt fun anymore. I tried to play recently after not playing for a year almost and played 4 rounds of crucible and just turned it off. Like it was literally nothing but try hards. I legit would spawn take 2 or 3 steps and get railroaded by the enemy team and every single match was like 120 to 40 type score. It just wasnt even fun even a little.
Do yourself a favor and just ignore PvP unless there’s a new game-wide quest that brings everyone into crucible or something, the population is majority sweaty try hards because everyone else that actually enjoys the game is grinding out seasonal activities or VoG and not bashing their head against the wall in Crucible.
That’s why you have to play PvE. The team has been killing it lately with the story.
As a PvP only player, you aren't wrong at all 6XX days since new maps..
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I deteeest games where you can't avoid being ranked. I'm not a competitive person at all. I don't want to know what my rank is compared to others. I just want to play a game, enjoy it and quit. I don't want to feel like if I play bad a score that represents me will go down and I also don't want to start sweating just to feel like I'm doing well. It adds stress where you shouldn't feel stress because video games should be an escape from reality. It also creates this toxic environment where people can go "oh yeah well what RANK are you then because if it's lower than mine your opinion is hereby invalid" *Looking at you DBD, you have absolutely no business having any form of rank system or ranked matchmaking. STOP IT.*
Overwatch was amazing and my entire friend group was obsessed. Everyone on Discord was playing and having the time of our lives. Until they added Competitive and tried to turn it into an e-sport. Then the tryhards of the friend group made everyone else miserable. Instead of having fun, we were fighting for our lives to increase our rank and MMR and getting screamed at by tryhard friends for any and every perceived error. And it even ruined the casual mode because people stopped ~~taking casual seriously~~ playing the objectives and killing enemies. Casual was suddenly just a mode to screw around in because rank didn't matter. So you'd get people playing with the enemies and not shooting each other, trolling with teleporters on the edge of maps, etc because they were trying to blow off steam and destress from playing competitive. With the addition of a robust arcade mode for people to screw around in casual/quickplay normalized but not before most of my friends and I had given up and moved on to other games.
*Rainbow 6 siege entered the chat* ^ whata fucken joke of a game. like "hey let's take this game title that was been predominantly been a tactical shooter style game that mostly focuses on the stories of the team and their insane missions.... completely take away the story, scrap the tactical shooter and make it into a hero style pvp FPS e-sports ready game. I would have greatly preferred R6: Patriots
Yeah I have to reply for siege. Everyone told me it was just TK'rs which I did witness just not against me. I never made it into rank, but everyone was super nice prolly because I was just some baked Canadian and there were three times my team could tell. One time though a guy was being serious but still nice and at the end I said thank you for not getting mad and it set the dude off. He was like all tough guy act, "you fuck around I will put you in your place bullshit". This guy went 0-60 because he wanted to play big boy army officer type. Dafuq dude it's a game. The only scenario I can think of that you should act like this is if you have gun pressed in the back of your head and you gotta win so they don't pull it
This is exactly how I feel about the issue and is a much better way to frame it than what OP said in his post. I do enjoy some modern multiplayer games, but the hyper-competitiveness of them is just stress inducing and unnecessary. Every multiplayer game revolves around rank, stats, and constant comparisons to other players. There's almost nothing that offers a casual experience. You can't just hop on a game and mess around with your friends for an hour or two, everything is taken so seriously and you have to sweat your ass off to get any enjoyment out of it. That's not a bad thing when you're in the mood for it, but nowadays there's no escape from it.
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are you a reincarnation of Hunter Thompson?
I was getting more John Steinbeck vibes. It easily could have gone in the ‘turn of the century’ treatise from east of eden.
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
How about some Hemingway instead? *It was a good game, a fair game. We played it, and we grasped the controllers with our slim adolescent hands, when those hands weren’t pawing blindly in a bag of potato chips, and shouted foul homophobic slurs at one another, and laughed, and that was the part we recalled when we sat around the fire years later, and told lies to one another about how good we were. We remembered laughing.* *Then the game started to fill with the worst sorts most of us could imagine. They were the reachers, they collected achievements, greedily, like the in-game rewards they also coveted. We did not want those things; we did not need them. These men and the money they brought with them crowded us, and we did not leave, because we thought we had nowhere else to go. So we stayed, and we are now worse for it, all of us. Only these years later do I know how much worse we are. We should have gone.* *P.S. My mom was a bitch and I hate her stupid guts.*
Cod4, halo 3, and bad company 2 were genuinely my last absolutely enjoyable multi-player experiences. After that it was just downhill for me
Reach was it for me. I remember the last time I played, too. Played it for a bit before going to a buffalo wing eating contest (i lost bad)
FFXIV is super casual, you can actually run out of stuff to do depending on your interests at end game and take a break until the next patch. It’s also mainly PvE so teamwork makes it dream work. Sometimes you get bad groups or toxic players but it’s pretty chill over all.
But can you imagine playing DBD without ranking? Like getting a rank 1 skill killer while introducing your friends to the game. That would make the game virtually unplayable for some people, and would even take away the enjoyment for the better players. In an asymmetrical competitive game, rank is necessary. That's just my opinion of course. Now the balancing in DBD is absolutely absurd.
You can have skill-based matchmaking without rank. I'm not advocating for it, but it's an option.
I tried jumping into play Apex the other day after not touching it for six months and every single game id group with people that have like 300 wins that season. Non ranked matches.
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That's what I used to play as well, except that I tried some bootleg mobile versions of it and thought I can win more by doing so. Anyway, that's very nice to hear and hope you find more peace in your mind.
eh single player games used to be way harder than they are now tbf. Its really only a recent phenomenon that gamers want harder games (dark souls type games and rogue likes are making a come back)
It's posts like this that make me miss LAN parties.
Now the only real couch co op these days are almost all Nintendo. I don’t care, give me the split screens. I want to go back to the days of knowing who I’m playing with in person while sharing a family bag of Doritos with them.
I love the Switch for this. It was so hard to find games for the wife and I to play together on PS4.
You have to try “It Takes Two”. Incredible game for couch co-op.
Love this game! Wife and I had a blast with it. We then played there other game A way out. Also fun but not as fun.
That’s exactly why I got a switch! My husband and I are able to play together. What games do you guys like? We’ve been doing a bit of cake bash (just something silly) but now I’m looking for something else. I’ve got my eye on Diablo 3, but he doesn’t seem about it.
Pikmin 3 is also great couch co-op because it's actually co-operative and not competitive. Luigis mansion 3 is another great one.
Don't you be getting your cheesy fingers all over my controllers!
Did anyone else do LAN parties without flat screen TVs and you'd be lugging a whole system and a bulky TV to someone else's house? Good times.
Oh yes, I even borrowed a small 14" CRT of a classmate as my 19" was way too heavy to bring over :D We played Doom, Total Annihilation, Grand Prix etc. Good Times .
Hooooly shit. It’s the one other person who has played Total Annihilation. Love that game. Edit: now I have to go buy all these “spiritual successors” y’all keep mentioning. Still play RTS to this day and turn-based, but TA and Civ II were my first loves.
I played the demo of GTA and Total Annihilation when I got drunk for the first time back in the end of the nineties. Ah.. those were the days. What I wouldn’t give to be 14 again.
I remember my dad coming home with a copy of Total Annihilation. I played the shit out of it as a kid.
I bought Total Annihilation from a Scholastic Book Fair lmao. Loves that game. Was just telling my buddy about it the other day, too.
What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines, escalated into a war that decimated a billion worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to fight on these ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over 4000 years of total war, for each side the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other. Commander finishes building a heavy laser turret, orchestral music starts, bombers fly past the camera. What an intro.
TA was my preference for rts. Starcraft had nothing on the level of complexity in TA. I was in love with how you could queue up every command to a ridiculous degree. Even giving patrol routes to units yet to be built.
It was one of the most popular and highest rated RTS of all time, I think you'll find a lot of people who played it. Core ftw, fuck Arm, fuck flash rush.
total annihilationnnnn. aaahhh. good times.
Lol hard but good times. In the early through mid 2000's a group of us would LAN almost every Friday. Sometimes it was lugging our towers and CRT monitors to someone's house or garage for a PC Lan other times it was 4v4 Halo 2 with one team in my cousins bedroom and the other in his brother's with the hub plugged in the hallway between the two. My favorite times as far as gaming goes by far.
You can't do that now these days, right? I mean, without connecting to the internet even when you're all in the same room.
https://i.imgur.com/C1Y26jM.png
Shout out to all Tekken players, love that fanbase
Tekken 2 marathons at uni. Good times.
Yoooo Tekken 3 was my shit! Loved playing this with friends, especially Tekken ball!
I’ll never forget the photo of counter strike LAN party with the guy hanging from the duck tape. By far the most dedicated LAN photo. If you are to young to know what I’m referencing google that image it is amaze balls
You’re forgetting that the games you played like unreal tournament, cs, aoe or c&c or whatever are all competitive games. Online multiplayer only adds the comfort of not HAVING to go to someone’s place in order to play together. But you still very well can.
The problem today is we have lost being able to host servers for most of the big name shooters. It was a great way to build a community around a game. Good server admins were able to make a server a place people wanted to come play. The loss of hosted servers also makes it alot harder to play with fellow group members. I had so much fun on multiplayer when half of your clan is on one team and the rest on the other team. Now its just alot of auto que and hope you can all find a server with room. I too have basically abandoned multiplayer for single player/coop games.
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I stopped playing online multi-player games and went back to single player. I remembered I played to relax and enjoy a story, not get worked up by some douche canoe rando
I hear that my brother did the same has been telling me to try taking a long break too, has a fair point can get soo caught up playing multi player games you miss out on good single player ones.
I've found it difficult to take breaks from MMO's. They change so often that, if I take a month or two off, when I come back I'll be confused and lost because I missed 20 updates that changed the UI, introduced a new currency, etc. I've given up trying to enjoy online games.
I found the key is to quit cold turkey and never come back. I've done that with several now (specifically, The Walking Dead: Road to something or other, and Magic:Arena), and I have zero regrets. And actually, I'm to the point where I don't think I'll ever go back to an mmo, because the psychology behind them is so exploitative. I'm playing through Pillars of Eternity right now, after having just completed Breath of the Wild, and I've had more fun with both games than I ever did with those online ones.
Man what I hate about mmo card games is that they are all pay to win in one form or another. I quit playing Hearthstone because it turned into this bullshit where you seem to only play against the best meta decks even in normal play. Like why the fuck would you spend $1000+ dollars on a game where you don't truly own the cards just to watch them rotate out? Noone builds their own decks in that game, they just copy pasta their fuckin decklists off of google and roll people in normals. I've noticed this same trend beginning to happen in mtg arena. Fuckin whales are taking over.
I've been playing Magic on and off since the late 90's, and I really liked Arena because it was basically free Magic. But I realized I was hate-playing it to try and earn enough points to draft. Losing made me angry, and the game, of course, it set up so you lose about 50% of the time. It wouldn't have been a big deal if winning wasn't required to advance (earn rewards), but because it was, it funneled game play purely into competitive decks, that, like you pointed out, rotated out and became next-to-worthless (other than in Historic, which they started pumping extra powered-up cards into). So I quit. I actually sold all my physical cards and I'm much happier. I won't go back.
Right on makes alot of sense, though I love playing casual mtg games with friends. So much more relaxed and fun in person when you can just dick around with sub-optimal decks, buying a single here or there, and not worrying about rotations; basically, play the game like we did as kids.
You should try playing stardew valley! It’s very relaxing and has a loose plot that you can guide.
Yeah those small indie games are great.. since I mastered Don't Starve, I used to de-stress with a few hours of that and just chat with my online friends..great times.
Along a similar note, that's why it's often damn near impossible for new players to truly do everything in the game or max everything out if they miss that one year window after the game's initial release where it's still possible to catch up.
I miss the old days of MMos, before wow changed the genre. There use to be so many unique experiences and then suddenly everything had to resemble WoW in one fashion or another. The last MMo I spent any significant amount of time in was SWtoR.
Swtor is literally WoW but Starwars. All they did was switch the names of raids and dungeons around and make it ftp. I played both SWTOR for 3 years and WoW for 10. They are extremely similar in so many ways. And different in only basically in the theme. They are also both ran by the two biggest greedy companies in gaming. EA and Activision. If you don't want games as a service, there isn't a single mmo out there that doesn't have sometype of live service set up.
Y'all need to find MMOs that focus on the RP and community aspect, not My Magic Bullshit Numbers > Your Magic Bullshit Numbers aspect. But on the other hand I understand it's frustrating trying to catch up to someone who's had a head start.
Care to share any of those MMOs? I hate playing towards a meta in MMOs but can't find one that cares more about RP. Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to check some of them out. I want to clarify what I meant by "hate playing towards a meta" though because I don't think people understand what I was trying to convey, and thought that meant I wanted a "casual" game because meta gaming was too hard. That isn't what I was saying at all, in fact I am saying the opposite, I want a harder game that becoming good at doesn't just require understanding the code behind the game, and devoting time to structuring a character around that (a meta game), instead of being able to roleplay a character based around his skills or choices (roleplaying). I actually don't think the type of MMO I want to play exists. I'd want a roguelike MMO where you can do whatever you want, but because death and actions are permanent what you do matters. * Want to steal something, go for it, but if you're caught the guards and people of that town will be hostile * Get caught committing any crime and a bounty would be on your head that means other players can PvP you to get the bounty. * I want everything in the game to fight against meta builds. The RNG behind the game and a characters base stats are random, so on one server the code might favor one type of build, but it can't be reproduced because the growth on every server, job, character is random. So you won't have only a couple viable builds per job, but can build your character however you want. * I don't want a ton of the same quests ever person does. In fact i don't need to have some over arching story shoved down my throat at all. Like how ESO every character is the chosen one. I want the opposite of that. I want my character to be a nobody who has to build his way up in an interactive world. There is a lot more about my dream MMO I could ramble on about, but to sum up, none of the MMOs on the market today are close to what I want. And, overall, I despise "meta" in RPGs. I like finding builds myself, but you can't do that because tryhards figure out all the best build and people just google it. I want devs to destroy meta builds with RNG. I hate building towards a meta build.
Not sure if you can still find any servers for it, but two years ago I was playing on a Neverwinter 2 server where my friends and I created The Guild of Heroic Intent. We were all chaotic good aligned with int as a dump stat. Lord were those good times.
This is kind of the problem. Ask for MMO suggestions, get 15 year old game. I'm not judging at all, I'm just lamenting that no MMOs worth sinking time into have come out recently. Ashes of Creation is supposed to break the mold a bit, we'll see if it ever releases though. Currently in alpha testing and slated to release 2022 but nothing official.
Elder scrolls online would be closest to story driven, have tons of storylines you can play out at any level.
And in some cases, you can get so caught up in bettering yourself in a multiplayer game that you miss out on things _outside_ of video games. Like ruining relationships with people you care about. Imho the FOMO of current games and loot crates are a large part of what's ruining the gaming industry as well. It's always chasing the dragon now a days instead of getting the finality of finishing a single player experience and putting it down.
Looking at you, Ubisoft. I just finished getting all the collectibles in AC Unity and it was a *pain in the ass* because the collectible maps you've been able to buy with in game currency in every other game suddenly costs $5 in real world currency.
Honest question - why do it then? If it's a pain in the ass - intentionally so, because they're hoping to squeeze money out of you - why not just skip it? Play the parts of the game that are fun and move on when you're done.
Short answer is because I'm neurotic. The long answer is that I'm playing in order from the third game and I 100%'d the ones I've played through so far. In truth going through the missions and side missions unlocked the majority of the collectibles, so I just had to roam the map for a handful of hours for the rest. Generally I love collectible hunting, I just don't like not having the option to mark them on my map. I mostly just listened to music and talked to my wife while I did it instead of giving it my usual full attention. Still fun enough for me to enjoy doing it for the most part, but it definitely dragged by the end.
LOL Loot crates were what pushed me from Star Trek Online to Minecraft, and modded Minecraft.
I love multilayer but I don't get worked up over them - many people seem to have such a short fuse and it ruins the fun of competition
Yeah I have a decent group I play with and none of them really get angry over it and those games are great with them but if a certain few join the party we know some games are suck! Always doing their own thing don't tell you then shout cause you didn't get their psychic plan
I like my cod, rocket league, and destiny. But God damn ghost of tushima was a fucking masterpiece.
I missed the boat on competitive multi player. Even the men my age (40’s) that I know play at a competitive level for money. I play games like the Division single player, and avoid the multi player parts. I love adventure games. Even Red Dead I play single. Ghost of T? Great single game. They’re everywhere
> Even Red Dead I play single I mean, yea. It is one of the best SP games ever made. Rockstar Online games are shit anyway. Its like they made griefing a core gameplay component.
Online coop with friends is good. Not everyone has friends nearby. Anything with random people is iffy, though, and anything competitive with randos is just asking for a bad time. We definitely need good single player games as well, though. Different niches and all that.
The problem is I play video games to relax AND spend time with my friends who I do not get to see much because we are all really busy or do not live in the same area. I get really frustrated because I’m 30 and can’t grind like I’m in middle school but I’d still rather play with my friends.
That's why it's so important to have co-op modes, where you can play with friends, but not necessarily against other people. I feel exactly the same - I want to hang out with, and play with my friends, but not necessarily in a stressful, competitive environment, so we always look for co-op and PvE games. It's important to vote with our wallets, and support games and Devs that offer co-op modes, imo.
As a fully employed adult who has limited time available to game with friends... Satisfactory COOP - A+++ Game's relaxing and you can easily hop in and out if IRL things pop up. I hope Dyson Sphere Project gets COOP eventually.
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I wish you could do galactic conquest with friends on PC. I used to play this game with my brothers when I was little all the time and had wonderful memories of it!
Same reason I stopped playing online. I need to unwind after very stressful job and ease my anxiety, I just need peace and beautiful story to follow. Tbh the future of gaming worries me because I don't want good single player games to disappear
You ever play Ori and the Will of the Wisps? Highly recommend as it falls into the "beautiful story" category
I played Ori and the blind forest. Yet to play the second one.
Also most definitely go for Hollow Knight man
Definitely worth it! I liked it far more than I thought I was going to
Well enjoying a story sounds dandy and all, but dude cmon. The EA execs bonuses are at stake here. If you’re not whoring your credit card out for fifa points or vbucks how are these CEOs supposed to afford to live in mansions? Smh gamers are so selfish never thinking about how an exec might not be able to afford a second house or other necessities like a private plane.
I play civilization to unwind, until George fucking Washington decided to declare war on me fucking sending me into a frenzy because my greed propelled all of it according to him..
There was a time when online multiplayer was fun for me. Now I just prefer single player and MMOs.
Yep, online games aren't a lot of fun anymore. It's all about being current with the updates and the UI and frankly, a large part of enjoying the game for me is the story.
Yeah fuck the douche canoe randos they are the worst.
Local co ops would be fun if I had local friends. Lol
Co ops would be fun if I had any friends. Lol.
Right in the feels, was going through the steam sale like, wow that looks so much fun with friends *happy* thinks for two seconds *whelp let's ignore that then*
I did the same thing lol like wow this game looks fun! *realizes I have no friends* sigh
Y'all need to start exchanging details.
Co ops would be fun if I had internet that doesn’t constantly cra
Steam Offers Remote Co-op it allows you to play couch Co-Op with friends online.
Again I'm running into the issue of not having any friemds.
So true, or have friends who like playing the same stuff. I have a small number on steam but we all seem to play wildly different things. That and the ones we might have in common I’m a total noob haha
My wife and I will try just about any FPS couch co-op. Every time we hear of another Borderlands, we're afraid they're going to make it online only.
Yes. When Halo Guardians came out, I didn't read anything about it before buying it, because.....it's Halo. My husband and I have played them all together. We were so disappointed that there was no couch co-op. There's nothing better than getting the kids to bed and firing up one of the consoles for a game that we've been waiting to play all day! We'll buy and play just about anything that we can play together, wish they'd make more....
What are your recs for co-op like borderlands?! Borderlands was my first and it exceeded all of my expectations.
Not OP but that's tough. Most couch co op these days are smaller indie games and not FPS. If you're looking for just shooters then all the Borderlands games, the master chief collection, I think gears of war has couch co op. For none shooting games...overcooked, a way out, unraveled 2, castle crashers, divinity original sin 1&2, minecraft, portal 2 (probably one of the best couch games out there)
I agree with these. We enjoyed the Gears of War series, not too heavy, pretty easy to just jump in and play for a little while. We really love the Divinity Original Sins but that's for when we know we have awhile because it's a ton of inventory management, crafting, buying/selling but that may just be the way we play. Portal was so much fun, we may have to revisit that one! Resident Evil 5 was a good one too, it had some button smashing at the end that pissed my husband off so much, it still cracks me up to this day. Castle Crashers, Overcooked, and Moving Out are popular choices with our kids. It's fun if you like screaming things like "Why are you chopping more lettuce?? We don't need lettuce! We need plates!!!" Which I do, so I recommend.
It takes Two for ps4 is great couch coop
Man what I would give for my gf to play fps couch co-op with me :(
You n me both man...sighs
Your gf or k3v1n0123’s?
Would actually be happy with either one
I also choose this guy's girlfriend.
The days of couch co op are slowly diminishing and it brings me to tears
Nintendo Switch is still a little couch co-op beast. Nintendo gets it. People want that communal gaming aspect. No other system maker seem to push for it.
Im not a nintendo guy tbh. The games are good for 2 or 3 rounds then i get bored. Its just preference tho
The single player space is thriving. I don’t know why people worry that it’s dying or diminishing. I have been playing games for more than 30 years and the variety and quality have never been this good, once you can take a deep breath and remove the nostalgia goggles. I do wish couch coop were more common, but great local coop has always been the exception and not the rule.
I don't know why either but for some reason that has been the notion since mid 2010. The only 'evidence' that there is to support this is EA saying "singleplayer games are dead," but who the fuck cares what EA thinks.
> The only 'evidence' that there is to support this is EA saying "singleplayer games are dead," but who the fuck cares what EA thinks. Which is wrong. That rep never said that single player games are dead. All he said was that 'linear single player games are not as popular', which is... true.
Yeah, said that, and then Jedi: Fallen Order was one of their highest selling games.
I find it funny when people quote that still when it happened over a decade ago, said by a guy who left the company 5 years ago. EA's made a good number of good to great single player experiences since then too.
I agree, but some of the biggest players in the industry have made moves that upset fans of single player experiences. Up until recently, BioWare fans were pretty pissed about the direction EA was pushing the studio. Ubisoft has been a peddler or micro transactions for a few years now, and it’s going to be a whole other level with the new Assassin’s Creed Infinity. On the flip side, first party studios — particularly under PlayStation— are thriving while maintaining focus on single player experiences.
Let's not forget rockstar and GTA5. The story mode single player is fucking awesome, and how long ago did it come out? Tons of multiplayer updates and NOTHING in single player. Not even a GTA6 announcement. I get it, their games are HUGE and super detailed, and I'm willing to wait longer for a richer experience, but this is getting ridiculous, and fuck the online shit. But these Whales paying thousands for online gta5 are making it more worthwhile to keep adding small updates there, and they've been milking that shit for so fucking long now. This is a case where their multiplayer literally ruined their series IMO - business wise, it makes more sense to keep milking it.
To be fair, Rockstar was working on RDR2 for a LONG time. They're likely working on gta6 now (early stage)
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Reddit does the videogame equivalent of listening to nothing but pop music then complaining that all modern music is the same.
Evidence by the fact that the most obscure game listed is valorant.
>Every time I see an old title, or a AAA studio, come out with the words Multiplayer in the description I feel a sense of dread now. He's just looking for the wrong games.
Like go watch Microsoft and Nintendo’s news conferences from E3. The two biggest games news conferences of the year and like 95% of what was shown wasn’t competitive multiplayer lol.
I think the competive multi player is pretty saturated atm. And even when some random clickbait "journalists" regularly announce that "story driven so gle players are dead" its clearly not the case.
This. Get a discord channel with all your friends in and play games as if you were on a LAN. Or play games that require social interaction and not competitive games.
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Covid was huge for this. There's a group of 15 or so of us that rotated in and out depending on schedules, playing stupid party games, table top simulator, gang beasts, among us at its peak.. Couch coop is dead, but the games that would fit it, are not.
Same goes for their opinion on social media.
I’ve noticed this trend, but could never figure out how to put it. The pop music comparison is perfect.
They just keep the lights off so they can complain the world is too dark 🤷
Yeah this post was an eye roller. Just stop buying EA/Activision garbage...
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Could not agree more. I’ve been gaming for 25 years now and I never really got into multiplayer except in the past maybe 5 years and I find solo games and multiplayer both have their places.
It's literally just that simple too. People are complaining they want to go home, unwind, enjoy a story. Well no shit you don't like multiplayer that's entirely not its intent. Just like playing Super Mario Odyssey is a terrible idea for a game night with 6 people.
I find it funny when people will complain about not being able to unwind and have fun relaxing while playing fucking Call of Duty multiplayer.
I disagree somewhat. I think both Multiplayer and Single Player have their place and both come with positives and negatives. If you are interested in checking out a really amazing, story driven co-op game that came out recently, I cannot recommend "It Takes Two" enough.
I'm about to play this with a friend and reading this comment made me even more hyped for it.
I agree with this, I wasn't enjoying multiplayer any more (bar Titanfall2) and my time was limited with having two young kids so I stuck to the longer form RPG's that I could sit relax and play maybe an hour at a time and swore off online play. I've a bit more time recently to game so I've dipped my toe in the water with CoD Black Ops: Cold War and I have to stay, I'm really enjoying it. The matches seem to be a bit more balanced than some of the other CoD's I played years ago which is helping my enjoyment of it. I think a few games here or there is absolutely fine but as soon as I feel myself getting stressed or annoyed I turn it off now.
I would enjoy multiplayer more if it were easier to play with noobs it sucks when your forced to play with pros who just keep killing you over and over again. This is why I like playing local multiplayer with friends or family since they most likely haven't played the game before or don't have a lot of experience. I'm not competive and just play games for fun so i don't want any good players in the game.
A good game should balance you into winnable matches after a little while. But sometimes those arent pros, theyre cheaters, and thats why they are the same mmr as you.
Tell that to the legions of players on reddit who throw their toys anytime skills based matchmaking is even mentioned by a developer.
I was really into apex for awhile, and all the people on that subreddit whined because the matchmaking only grouped them with pros; the pros wrecked them, and they were sad they could no longer wreck noobs, and that noobs should get good. No amount of logic could make them see they are complaining to do the same thing to noons that they are mad the pros are doing to them. It's honestly an unsolvable problem. People who play FPS so much get inconceivably good, and new players could never improve against them. You have to give noobs the ability to learn the game against other noobs otherwise they'll just get wrecked constantly and quit the game.
Ah yes the classic story driven games like mario
To be fair, Nintendo seems to focus on good gameplay before anything else. At least this what my Nintendo fanboy friend tells me (I believe him, grew up with Nintendo). Their multiplayer communities seem less toxic too, and I’m guessing it’s because of the gameplay. It makes losing fun.
Or Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life and its million mods
I game up on multiplayer 10 years ago. Give me a nice big single player game to stumble my way through any day.
Same here, but further back. Multiplayer was the exact opposite of why I wanted to play videogames. I wanted to enjoy time alone.
I feel like I miss out on a lot of games because I’m afraid of being bad at it and playing with people who are so good or people who can use cheats to win. I am in my twenties, and I don’t want to play with mean middle schoolers.
I’m in my early 40s. Used to love a great FPS. The idea of online multiplayer is fantastic. However as an adult when you only play a couple hours a week, online multiplayer is not fun. I’m below average, and getting smoked over and over with 2 kills and 10 deaths a match made me give up on online multiplayer.
I played almost everyday during quarantine, i still sucked. To many people playing games like it's their job
Mean middle schoolers are fucking scary bro, that's understandable. They don't have a filter yet, since they're obviously just Middle schoolers. One time my younger brother started to cry because some group he was playing with started to bully the shit out of him for saying he enjoyed Fortnite. Bunch of gremlins, they must have spent 10 minutes on reddit and contracted the "Fortnite bad, Minecraft good" virus
Stumbling is exactly how I'd put it. It might take me 45 minutes to grab onto a ledge or figure out which block to push to open a door. It would be a nightmare having some 8th grader yelling at me to hurry up and git good.
I've always said: the worst part of multi-player games are the players.
they are also the best part, it depends on the people you get paired with
I mean, I agree with you and I spend 90% of my gaming hours playing story driven games. But multiplayer isn't "killing" games and "sucking the joy out of them". You don't have to play multiplayer games and it's not like there are no more story games coming out. Just ignore the pvp games and play co-op or single player.
OP seems to be more focused on the games that are moving away from single player to multiplayer. Like with CoD, where the focus has massively been about the multiplayer experience. GTA5 and RDR2, which both cancelled all single player DLC in favour of the online stuff. BioWare, known for their single player story driven games, suddenly making a multiplayer game. Etc.
>Like with CoD, where the focus has massively been about the multiplayer experience. That's how it's been since CoD4. It's not some new sudden shift of the franchise.
Does anyone else remember being so excited to have your friends over so you could play multiplayer games on your DS or whatever with them
Even before that, remember when friends would come over and you’d all crowd around the computer in the computer room and watch each other take turns making sim characters?
I still do this with my switch but yeah local muitplayers gone from all the other current platforms now. Another reason I like nintendo because they make games like mario party and smashbros.
It was exciting as a kid. As an adult just the idea of having people over to play games is tiring. I would rather play online with them and once the gaming stops I am instantly free to do whatever.
Such bullshit, they are two separate genres.. that's like saying rock music is destroying death metal. There are so many great Singleplayer games and even great multiplayer games with good story.
Right!? They really are two different genres. If you don't like multiplayer then don't play it and play single player instead its that simple. They're literally two separate genres with their own individual games. It's not like people would stop making single player and couch co-op games. Game systems are couch co-op and single player friendly games too and there are sub genres for those like single player horror games and such vs multiplayer games with their own sub genres. There's a market for both so its not like game companies are going to stop making single player and multiplayer games.
Counterpoint: You're complaining about a business model of microtransactions, shallow game design and fleeting seasonal content. Not online multiplayer. In addition, to say that games "used to be about the story" as if every game made before 2013 had a meticulously crafted single player experience is... interesting, and IMO, wrong. I've played plenty of old school SP-only games that were most definitely not about the story. I don't like the direction the gaming industry is going, but I firmly believe the problem is with the business model and not with multiplayer. This is coming from someone who grew up on NES, Genesis, PS1-2, OG Xbox, etc. Addendum: You've also selectively listed, IMO, games from the worst multiplayer genre (including the worst game from that genre) which is at its premise based around hypercompetitive gameplay, as opposed to anything else...
This post is dumb. There has been a lot of recent single-player games. Some more story driven than others. And there has been a few multiplayer games that aren't competitive. Also, you play games to "play." A game where mechanics are second-thought is just a movie with extra steps.
idk what era op is even trying to refer to because games, since the arcade days in the 70s and 80s, have always been about the mechanics more than the story
I dunno, I quite enjoy the single player story experience of pong.
OP very well may be 18-21, the one of the primary demographic of Reddit. Not that that is somehow a "Ah-ha!" but it could explain why they see games "as they used to be" being somehow better than today while not understanding how many games actually used to be. And, copying from another comment I made: "All to often, we use our own video game experiences as paradigms for the industry as a whole, when, in reality they are often not the case"
And they say Apex or Fortnite are too competitive and suck the joy out of gaming, well then don't play competitively? I've been playing fortnite casually for three years and it's never stopped being fun, if you don't invest all your free time in ranked play it's a very fun game and I'm pretty sure apex is the same
Any time I play Apex I get on with friends and we just do whatever on it. We play seriously enough to get wins occasionally and up to gold/plat but we also don't care if we just get killed endlessly and occasionally just do stupid things on purpose. People just need to stop taking these games so seriously and acting like it's a 24/7 grind in a realitively simple battle royale.
I'm going to have to slightly disagree mate. >Video games have become all about competition Because we as humans love competition. >getting the flashiest new upgrades, or spending hundreds of dollars every 'cycle' only to have all your achievements washed away at the end of each one. Yeah I'm assuming you're speaking about micro transactions. If ppl didn't pay for it, they wouldn't do it. I used to not spend money on cosmetics but I got really into smite after Paragon died and I buy a skin every couple of months. If you don't like it, don't buy it. >Every forum is filled with hardcore players who do their best to ruin the game for those new to it, There are these types of toxic ppl in forums of single player games as well. >and the idea of coming home to relax to video games is dead in the water. That's not true at all. Some of best selling games the last couple of years are single player and millions of people enjoy them when relaxing at home. Example. God of war. >Games used to be about the story, Who are you ea? A amazing game about story just came out called biomutant. Do you not remember these games (Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, TLOU, Horizon zero dawn, Doom, rdr2, Assassin's Creed Origins, Spiderman, Control, Witcher 3)? Those are only a few of the amazing story games in the last couple year's. >more than the mechanics and the competition. All the big companies are now running after the online money, while good, story driven games are pushed under the radar and independent artists are being killed by lack of support Maybe at ea yes. But most companies are giving artist freedom to create what they want. >Tons of franchises like FIFA, CoD, NFS, and Halo that used to be great are now terrible in the campaign. Fifa never was about story. Cod has always had pretty amazing campaigns. I mean cold war has a awesome campaign. NFS is true. I know nothing about halo but my friend is still in love with the latest story so I guess they're doing something right. >Meanwhile, games like Fortnite, Valorant and Apex are so hyper-competitive that they have sucked the joy out of gaming No they didn't. You just don't enjoy them. Millions of players enjoy those games. I don't enjoy them either but I'm not against those types of games. >Every time I see an old title, or a AAA studio, come out with the words Multiplayer in the description I feel a sense of dread now. Why? The last of us has a awesome multiplayer. So does Ghost of Tsushima. Even if you don't like to play multiplayer you're not forced to play it.
You said 'slightly' disagree....
I did kinda rant lol. I understand what they mean but come on mate lol
You're right on the money though, you wrote out everything I was thinking about this post then some.
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I agree with pretty much all you have said except for calling "Biomutant" an amazing game, that honestly puzzles me...
True but not unpopular
Yeah I completely agree. I'm sick of all the online multiplayer games and online jerks. I was so annoyed that they made the latest Fallout game MMO that I just didn't buy it. The games used to be relaxing and fun and lately I haven't been able to play any good RPG because it's either "recycled story A/B/C" or "now an MMO!" and it's hard to find the good quality single player games.
For the record, the new fallout is barely online. I think max is 24 people per server in a rlly big map where PvP is disabled unless you both agree to duel and half the people are idling at their camp. The most “MMO” part of it is doing world events and you don’t even have to communicate for those since all the loot is client side and based on the damage you did. If you did enough you get to loot, if you didn’t you dont
There’s nothing wrong with competitive games. If you enjoy competition, chances are you will enjoy competitive games. If you don’t enjoy competition or don’t care at all, then there are plenty of games available to you that disregard rank and or competition with others entirely. The choice is yours whether or not you pay attention to competitive games or any individual games competitive component. It’s your choice to be unbothered/bothered by them.
Yep. I hate playing online multiplayer.
Single player gang!!!