Editorial: Singleplayer vs. Multiplayer and the battle for the spotlight

Singleplayer vs. Multiplayer and the battle for the spotlight

          Last week’s editorial looked at the insane prerelease campaign for No Man’s Sky, and all the controversy the game went through as it made its merry way down the yellow brick road to launch.

          Unfortunately, this crazy train is showing no signs of stopping. For now, let’s put aside the mess that is the PC port. That’s a topic for somebody else to cover, since I normally buy my games on console if I can and have very little knowledge of how to make a PC run a game properly.

          Instead, let’s talk about where Hello Games really seemed to blow it. At one point, it was confirmed No Man’s Sky would have multiplayer. Later on, they said it wouldn’t have multiplayer. This is all fine and dandy. Games change in development, features are added and removed, and so on. No Man’s Sky is already a massive game. I can only imagine making it an MMO would only increase the strain on the servers, and some might consider it superfluous as it would be rare to find another human being in this massive universe.

          Despite this, the game launched with many people mistakenly believing it to be online multiplayer, and feeling like they got cheated as a result. I could go on about how you should research games thoroughly before you buy them and read as many reviews as possible, but that’s a conversation for another day. Instead, I’m going to go over a trend that I’ve been seeing more and more recently in gaming culture: the battle between singleplayer and multiplayer.

          Back in the days of yore, this problem was non-existent. Some games were a singleplayer adventure where you fought your way to the end of the story campaign and that was it. Others were multiplayer experiences, where you gathered your friends around the TV, gave everyone a controller, and played together. Sometimes the two would cross over, with a game like a Street Fighter game having an Arcade Mode, but that was it.

          But with the arrival of online multiplayer, everything changed. Suddenly games became either primarily singleplayer or primarily multiplayer, but they’d always have the other tacked on somewhere, regardless of how lackluster it would be. How many people ever played Call of Duty for the campaign? And who bought an Uncharted game for the multiplayer? And yet, they existed all the same.

          Which brings us today, with the arrival of multiplayer-only games. AAA games like Star Wars Battlefront, Evolve, and Overwatch have eschewed the campaign entirely, giving players an entirely online, multiplayer experience. These have usually had mixed results, with Overwatch being adored upon release and still being talked about today, Evolve going on life support just weeks after launch and eventually deciding to go free-to-play, and Battlefront being met with a resounding “meh”.

          Primarily singleplayer games still have multiplayer components added on, like Uncharted 4 and Doom, although people primarily talk about the campaign. Vice-versa, the Call of Duty and Battlefield series continue to have campaigns, although no one ever seems to play them. Hell, a lot of EA’s E3 presentation for Titanfall 2 talked about how exciting it was that there was a singleplayer campaign, although Titanfall is, again, a primarily multiplayer experience.

          There’s also Splatoon, which, as usual, is the dark horse in all of this. It features both a fully fleshed singleplayer and multiplayer mode, with both being equally praised. Granted, I didn’t like Splatoon’s single player as much as everyone else seemed to (although I still play the multiplayer every once in a while), but people seemed to be happy that it was there.

          So that brings us back to my initial question, as posed by No Man’s Sky. Does every game need to have both singleplayer and multiplayer elements?

          My answer to all this is, while it often helps to have a singleplayer in a multiplayer focused game, or vice versa, not every game needs both. While it may have been interesting to have a singleplayer campaign in Overwatch, the game didn’t need it. However, Star Wars Battlefront could’ve benefited from having a singleplayer mode, as it got boring extremely fast.

          As for No Man’s Sky, while I don’t hate it as much as everyone else seems to, there’s certainly a lot of things I dislike about the game, one of them being the lack of liveliness in the world. What if they’d handled multiplayer similarly to Journey, where you couldn’t really interact with the random people you met online, while also offering a way to meet your friends? Considering the sheer size of No Man’s Sky (plus the fact that they can’t seem to properly port the game to PC), maybe it was just too much for the game to handle. With the promise of added features coming in the future, we can hold out hope that we can explore this barren galaxy with our friends before everyone collectively forgets about the game.

Song of the Week

          I mentioned earlier in this editorial that I wasn’t a huge fan of the singleplayer mode in Splatoon. What I really did like in that mode, however, was the final boss music, specifically Calamari Inkantation, which plays during the second half of the fight. It’s my favourite piece from the entire game, and makes me wish they gave us more Squid Sisters songs.