Hold your horses, kids. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Yes, one of the chiefly important people in charge of the Playstation 4 said that he thinks games will lose what we’ve regularly come to understand as the “singleplayer” portion. On the surface that’s horrible! We like singleplayer games! Boo to that idea!
Except what he’s actually saying makes for a way more interesting experience where we’d almost be alright with them going away forever. Are you calmed down yet? Phew.
Perhaps you could argue that I could have written a better title that didn’t get you as worried. You’d be right. I’m a hack.
At a recent panel reported on by Eurogamer, Cerny told those around:
"Right now you sit in your living room and you're playing a game by yourself – we call it the sp mission or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook I just don't think that's going to last."
I’ve never heard it called the “sp mission”, for the record. Have you? Anyway, he added:
“Demon's Souls, even though on one level it's a single-player game, as you're walking through the world you're seeing the ghosts of everybody who died in that world via the internet. You can leave messages for them. They can leave messages for you. There's actually a boss you fight in that game which is controlled by another player.
What he’s talking about is non-player involvement in a single player game. Having an active involvement in something that someone else is playing even if you aren’t working co-operatively or in an explicitly multiplayer mode.
Demon’s Souls might have been the genesis of this idea, and we’ve already seen similar functionality leak into games like ZombiU and teased as likely existing in the upcoming Watch Dogs.
This is a good thing. This is social interaction with gameplay benefits that don’t take away from playing a game on your own.
It’s a step toward a world where every game is Dark Souls. Every game should be Dark Souls. That’s a world we should live in.