In which I ramble about Single Player vs. MMOs
I’m a gamer. That’s not news to anybody. As time goes on I spend less and less time doing it and frankly that’s really a wonderful wonderful trend that I’m inclined not to force along.
One of the things I have been doing is going back to single-player games from MMOs.
And I’ve been really quite surprised, even shocked, at the quality of the single-player offerings out there.
BioShock was truly awesome. It was just creepy enough but wasn’t so bad that I wigged out. I never felt quite so much like I was in the middle of a story and I had to go digging around to find the next chapter as I have with BioShock.
Half Life 2 I finished this past Saturday. That’s another one that fits in to that same category: The writing was really good. It was a little more grindy and an awful lot more FPSfull than BioShock. But then it’s supposed to be.
I moved immediately into HL2: Episode One which is the next stage in the story. Episode One suffers from something hinted slightly at in the game play of Half Life 2. On the normal setting there are scenes/levels that are just a little too overwhelming for a casual gamer.
I don’t expect games to be a cakewalk (unless it’s C&C Generals: Zero Hour, which I play still just to get some easy wins under my belt.)
So why this move to Single Players?
Let’s face it (*gets ready to duck*)
MMOs suck. They ALL suck.
Every.
Last.
One.
Yes, even EvE. But I’ll say that EvE is better than the rest by an immeasurably huge margin.
The micro level gameplay is important and almost the sole reason to play MMOs. Some of them have interesting small scale storylines, quest/mission series elements or “endgames.” But as a whole they’re disjointed, stateless (an interesting irony) repeatative and boring.
Why? They HAVE to be. You have a player moving up in progression from n00b (Level 1) to uber (level cap du jour) and at any point (and every point in the game) other players are joining at level one. The experience for them is exactly the same as someone who joined a month or a year ago (normal content updates notwithstanding.)
It’s ironic really, the very thing that makes an MMO “interesting” is the fact that it’s a persistent playing field with other people. But that very nature prevents the storyline from evolving at all.
The individual experience can be very much like a single-player game through chains of objectives. This is something that Lord of the Rings Online does very well. But you still hear the echoes of other players on chat channels talking about all the great stuff you can’t get anywhere near yet, so you’re constantly playing catch-up (group or solo.)
MMO developers and producers have tried to simulate this changing of environment by introducing progressively more advanced and interesting zones. But everybody really is in the same soup of content. You can always, as an advanced player, go back to the beginning where you’re ridiculously out of balance to the surrounding area. And it’s just no fun.
So as a goof a couple months ago I downloaded the BioShock demo (or beta or something, yay FilePlanet) and it was really quite something. (I’ll never buy a game I haven’t tried again.) There was an involved compelling storyline and the gameplay was interesting enough that it really kept me at all times curious and excited about what was coming next.
When I bought it and played for a few hours I found this wasn’t lessened at all. Only at the very end, when I’d made my irrevocable decisions that affected the path was I starting to peter out due to a certain “sameness.” The game really felt as though it was winding down.
But then there was a delightful well-written plot twist and I realized the game was probably only about 2/3 over.
Great stuff.
In Half Life 2 The final “blow up the nasty bad evil thing” stopped, and there was a cut-scene that was so engaging I ran right into the next installment (which, because I bought the Orange Box I already had.)
And “Episode One” started with was a perfectly smooth transition. But given the aforementioned difficulties I may crank the difficulty down a notch momentarily. It’s something I’m loathe to do. But I’m not going to bang my head against a wall trying to figure out the exact right sequence of gunshots, dodge & weaves and the like.
After all, I’m really just a casual gamer.
Tags: UCCU