I hate online multiplayer games. Whenever there is a big announcement that some studio whose previous games I liked is making a new game, my attention to the project and my interest in it swiftly jumps out the window as soon as the words “online multiplayer” are mentioned. I just don’t care for those experiences. I want to play my games alone. Maybe with a friend or two in my living room. But not with a bunch of total strangers on the net.
Being an adult with somewhat adult responsibilities, I have limited time to play games. Dedicating any of my video game time to playing online multiplayer is making a risky investment, even if the game in question is great, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee to me that the people I have to play it with are. That is one thing when it comes to skill based competitive game types like the various deathmatches and the like, but gets even worse when any kind of narrative is involved.
I have yet to encounter any kind of online gaming experience that delivers me the kind of narrative depth an offline game delivers. Even if it’s traditional co-op, even if I play with a friend who is not a total stranger. Even those games tend to become unfocused. Online mulitplayer games always have this unavoidable dissonance between the people playing the game and the game itself. This is a gap that seems impossible to bridge.
And that is the reason I can’t be arsed to care for these games. They offer me nothing. I will always go for a singleplayer experience over a multiplayer one. I play games for the escapism, for the immersive narrative experience, and I have no need to get the little time I have for this hobby ruined by people abusing the dance emote, or talking trash, or misbehaving in various other ways. The problem with online multiplayer games is, the people I am forced to play with constantly remind me of that I am playing a game, they destroy my suspension of disbelief.
This is the reason why I can’t be bothered with Bungie’s upcoming big project Destiny. The game world’s fiction sounds pretty good, the concept art looks amazing, and even the game concept would be fine, if it wasn’t for the online multiplayer part, which as it turns out to nobody’s surprise, is front and center to the whole experience. I just can’t bother.
The other players will cheapen my experience. They always do. They destroy the immersive potential. Playing Destiny, I will not mingle with the denizens of a destroyed Earth in a pretty ruined city, I will play a game where people run their avatars around a virtual marketplace, spamming emotes and constantly testing the boundaries of the open chat’s text filter. Fans of online multiplayer games will now probably tell me that this is the price, that you have to accept this as a part of the system. But I won’t. This is not worth my time.
Artificial Intelligence beats real stupidity. Every time. Populate a city marketplace in a game with AI characters, and those too will of course not behave “naturally”. There is always and uncanny valley. Honestly, I am not quite sure why I am so easily upset by people in online games. I just am. Dysfunctional AI annoys me far, far less than misbehaving players. And I’ve tried overcoming this, time and again, but to no avail.
Bungie’s Destiny will also not change that for me. No single game will ever be able to do that. Though there were a handful of examples recently where it actually worked. One was Journey, because the game just made abusing any of its mechanics to break immersion and ruin the experience and shatter the illusion impossible. The other was DayZ, where other players did ruin my day, but not because they were acting out of character. The third (and fourth) are the Souls games by From Software.
But those are rare examples. In these games, non essential interaction between the players is limited, and the games themselves exert enough pressure onto the players to keep them focused. Unlike Massive Multiplayer Games, unlike many online shooters and the like. So this does not mean that there is hope for me. I will never like, and much less prefer online multiplayer games to singleplayer ones. Maybe it’s a matter of taste. But this multiplayer first, singleplayer maybe future doesn’t hold much for me.
