OK, now don't think I'm not for progress. I have enjoyed the occasional small LAN gathering to play Battlefield, etc... but lately as a primarily solo gamer, I am becoming more fed up.

The games tend to become tiresome to me unless there is some overriding storyline with the ability to take creative actions.

Doom quickly lost interest to me, and all others of the FPS genre are in the same boat with a few stellar exceptions. Max Payne and Far Cry were exceptional and kept me glued to the game from start to finish.

Battlefield (1942, 'Nam and 2) are great, but I have noticed a distinct lack of programming as it relates to story lines. 1942 was a natural, as the story was already there, but as more people gravitated to the online version of play, fewer and fewer scenerios were included.

This may be just a marketing ploy to sell expansion packs, as EA is fond of doing, but I think there is more to it than that.

I believe that the game companies are seeing the growth of online games and concluding that the same people who used to play by themselves no longer want to... and we can save development time and money by pushing the programming back onto the players this way.

Now I still love the D&D games, but that seems to be slowly vanishing the same way as the 78rpm single.

Where is the next Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate game?

Where are the Flight Combat simulators of old? X-Wing, Apache or Falcon?

If I wanted to simulate flying, I'd build an R/C plane. You can't very well arm one and fight against others, at least not safely or legally, so why would I want to fly a Boeing sim from M$?

I want a variety of games, not just everyone jumping on the band wagon of online gaming to the exclusion of everything else.

Why can't they continue to make compelling solo games any more?

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.




Well, not really... there's always freecell.

a lot of console games still have good storylines but even that's going to slowly disappear as more and more games are made for xbox live and sony's equivalent.

i for one would love to see a remake of the x-wing simulators with updated graphics.

I have yet to find a single player game that equals the original Quake or Half Life, and I am still stuck playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory online, there just isn't anything that comes close!

Doom3, HL-2 Far Cry and BF-2 were OK, but nothing that realy grabed me

Nice write up Im_gumby!

For me the SP is fun, and I enjoy it, but the MP is my reward for having finished the SP. The MP is what gives longevity to the games. Keeps players coming back, and buying more. This was never more apparent than with the MMO games. Which to me are a ripoff. No way will I pay $40 - 50 for a game then turn around and pay a monthly fee to continue to enjoy it.

Keep your chin up though there are some incredible SP minded games coming out very soon! Quake 4 for instance! I cannot wait for that game!

Then in 2006 th release of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars....

*Sigh*

Looking forward to "City of Villians" myself...

I may be a little old school, but I think there has yet to be a game that matches Duke3D in it's openness, problem-solving, game play, and of course wanton acts or sexual deviance and destruction. I really want a game that gives me an over quality of game play in solo version, then a quality multiplayer experience, that's what D3D gave me. Eye-candy can come in second to a good story line and playability. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 were far too linear for my liking, and most MMO's have worse than AI-controlled bots playing, at least the bots don't TK as much.

OMG!!! I feel the same way Im_gumby! I dislike multiplayer games (but I do play them).You see a game at the store that looks awsome.......and it looks like a single player game..but nope..You read it and it says multiplayer game!

I agree to some extent. I think it really depends on the game, though. For CS or UT, you don't really need a story. The story is: the other dude is trying to shoot you... get him first. Multiplayer is enjoyable because every game/round is totally different. I do agree, however, that the single player component has to be compelling enough. To me, the single player is sort of boot camp for how to play online. You get comfortable with the controls and learn how to fight, etc. As we all know from watching training videos, however, without a plot this can get pretty dull. I'm playing through Doom 3 right now, and it's getting a little tedious. Half-Life, on the other hand, I can play through over and over again and it's still great.

gumby, i hate to break this to you (honestly), but at least one of the new D&D games is a mmorpg:

http://www.ddo.com/

the other...well, it's a Real Time Strategy game: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...w_6121997.html

"City of Heroes" is pretty cool because there are literally dozens of different story arcs that all tie into one another in some form or fashion.

You start of fighting Hellions and Skulls (mostly), who are all the street level thugs selling a drug called Superadine. Then you move onto Outcasts and Trolls, who are villians that have been "enhanced" by using the drug. About this time, you also fill in with a different storyline about the mechanical Clockwork robots (they don't have anything to do with the drug).

From these folks, you move onto to the Tsoo (a Hmong criminal element), Warriors, and the "Family", who are fighting for distribution control of the drug. It's about this time that you start learning there is more to this drug than meets the eye. Apparently, it frees up a part of our brains that we don't use...the part that can manipulate time and energy.

Next thing you know, you're fighting aliens from several different dimensions and, best of all, "negative" (or evil) copies of the city's most prominent SuperHeroes.

Along the way, you also have a tussle or two with the Freakshow (a street gang that enhances their bodies with cybernetic additions...i.e., arms), the 5th Column (a group of neo-Nazis bent on world domination), the Banished Pantheon and the Circle of Thorns (two different magical groups fighting for spiritual control of the world), the Council (a group of 5th Column villains that failed in their takeover bid so they formed their own faction), Crey Industries (a front company for a criminal gang intent on enslaving SuperHeroes to do their bidding), Malta (a super-secret faction deep within the government intent on.....well, sort of like the Illuminati, in a way), and the Ritki (an alien race that invaded Earth and set up present day Paragon City).

That's only a part of the villains that you face in "City of Heroes". There are what are known as "Story Arcs" given out by a contact that gives you a mission. While almost all of the missions that involve entering the mission through a door have the same type of layout (either an office building, burned out office building, a warehouse, two different sets of caves, or a sewer), the story line that you follow to "solve" the mystery is the most interesting part of it all. There is no option to fail (i.e., you chose) as the mission leads you to the same finale.

That's what keeps me coming back to "City of Heroes"...that, and the friends I play online with. It's almost like each story arc is it's own graphically driven comic book.

Enko would probably be better off to tell you about all the story arcs. He loves to collect experience debt by dying all the time, thereby slowing down his toon's advancement, just so he can complete the story arcs for every single available contact.

Yeah, most folks will tell you, you run into a building, kill everyone, disarm the bomb, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's what some folks get out of it but not me. I read the story arc and that's what makes this game unique to me.

Rob

Ok do you remember those books that had alternate endings? Where at one point you could choose to save johnny or leave him behind and then go to corresponding pages. Well there should be a game that encorporates this logic. Say for a FPS like uhh counterstrike, you go in and finish off all of the terrorists, then you go to the next level and a whole nother set of terrorists blah blah blah, but say you finish them all off but one and he escapes, you then have to find him in say another level and he has buddies from his clan. That is just an idea of a way to enhance online gaming, switch it up. On the other hand...

Me and some friends came up with the theoretical perfect online game that we would create. We were just brainstorming and just imagined that we were on the dev team at say valve and had access to level creators and the supercomputers ect. We had an idea for a zombie game like resident evil and 28 days later. Here was the idea: You buy the game and you can play online without monthly charges. You create your own character (which skinning tools would be provided) and you go from there. You would "spawn" into a server, the server would be a city. In the city an infection would break out and there would be zombies blah blah blah. Using graphics and a physics engine similar to half life 2 you could pick up anything and use it as a weapon against the zombies, the object would be to either escape or stay alive long enough untill support could come.

The whole reason I talked about my idea of a great online game is because I also feel that a good online game is lacking. Yeah you can join servers and play together but I have yet to see a game that brings people together to accomplish a main goal and actually have a plot to work with. Yeah it is fun to blow someone into gibbs and run through where their body just was a second ago, but where is the game that is so personal to bring together a community. I think a game that can have team work on the hundreds and provides a good story is a winner in my book. One problem I see is money. It is going to take so much time and money to create such a game on that level it might become a black hole. IMO I think we have yet to see what online gaming can truly be, untill I can interact with people and work together online gaming is just not up to par.

You mean, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books?

Man, I freakin' loved those in Jr. High!!!

Here are some links...

CYOA (don't really know what this page is for...)

Wikipedia

e-Bay

Amazon.com

LINK

and it's even on DVD now...

LINK

...however, that was slightly off-topic, to some extent.

To build in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" into a game would require enormous amounts of coding that would take years to write. That series of books had on average 15 seperate endings to them. That would mean that you would have to write a minimum of 15 different storylines in a game, which is way too much to do.

I'll admit that it's a fantastic idea, but I just don't see how it could work in today's age....(tomorrow is a different story, though).

Rob

sadly i think a big reason that we are seeing a decline in single player games and a rise in multiplayer games is because of pirating. it is much easier to pirate a neverwinter nights or KOTOR or farcry because you dont have to deal with online authentication. try running a pirated version of world of warcraft or city of heroes and see how well it works. i think that probably as many people play single player games as do multiplayer games, but the sales numbers dont show it because its fairly easy to just steal a single player game, where an online game is difficult to get away with taking illegally. therefore, its not worth it as much for the publishers to make more single player games

Quote: Originally Posted by Rob "City of Heroes" is pretty cool because there are literally dozens of different story arcs that all tie into one another in some form or fashion. You start of fighting Hellions and Skulls (mostly), who are all the street level thugs selling a drug called Superadine. Then you move onto Outcasts and Trolls, who are villians that have been "enhanced" by using the drug. About this time, you also fill in with a different storyline about the mechanical Clockwork robots (they don't have anything to do with the drug). From these folks, you move onto to the Tsoo (a Hmong criminal element), Warriors, and the "Family", who are fighting for distribution control of the drug. It's about this time that you start learning there is more to this drug than meets the eye. Apparently, it frees up a part of our brains that we don't use...the part that can manipulate time and energy. Next thing you know, you're fighting aliens from several different dimensions and, best of all, "negative" (or evil) copies of the city's most prominent SuperHeroes. Along the way, you also have a tussle or two with the Freakshow (a street gang that enhances their bodies with cybernetic additions...i.e., arms), the 5th Column (a group of neo-Nazis bent on world domination), the Banished Pantheon and the Circle of Thorns (two different magical groups fighting for spiritual control of the world), the Council (a group of 5th Column villains that failed in their takeover bid so they formed their own faction), Crey Industries (a front company for a criminal gang intent on enslaving SuperHeroes to do their bidding), Malta (a super-secret faction deep within the government intent on.....well, sort of like the Illuminati, in a way), and the Ritki (an alien race that invaded Earth and set up present day Paragon City). That's only a part of the villains that you face in "City of Heroes". There are what are known as "Story Arcs" given out by a contact that gives you a mission. While almost all of the missions that involve entering the mission through a door have the same type of layout (either an office building, burned out office building, a warehouse, two different sets of caves, or a sewer), the story line that you follow to "solve" the mystery is the most interesting part of it all. There is no option to fail (i.e., you chose) as the mission leads you to the same finale. That's what keeps me coming back to "City of Heroes"...that, and the friends I play online with. It's almost like each story arc is it's own graphically driven comic book. Enko would probably be better off to tell you about all the story arcs. He loves to collect experience debt by dying all the time, thereby slowing down his toon's advancement, just so he can complete the story arcs for every single available contact. Yeah, most folks will tell you, you run into a building, kill everyone, disarm the bomb, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's what some folks get out of it but not me. I read the story arc and that's what makes this game unique to me. Rob

Hey rob, all MMO games have intricate storylines.
World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Ultima Online, ETC. It is just part of it.
Even though most people dont read them, there there.
Lineage 2 had Very long and still ongoing one, it would take you a couple hours to read through all of the current storyline, and its updated about once every couple of months when the latest chronicle comes out.
In the end, everything has a storyline, it is just a little harder to find in MMO games.

Quote: Originally Posted by fatsobob all MMO games have intricate storylines. Even though most people dont read them, there there.

I don't think that's a very good substitute. You don't read a book, then go to the movies to watch the action scenes only...

There has to be a better way to incorporate the story into the game itself.

Well, I do read the storylines of hte games I play, but I was saying that there are those individuals who just pick up a game and play.
I actually read about where my social life is going before I buy the game.
I think I made a good choice with WoW.

I CAN PLAY WITH PEOPLE I CAN DANCE ALL DAY I CAN DANCE ALL DAY TRY N HIT ME COME ON TRY TRY!!!

BOOM HEADSHOT BOOM HEADSHOT!!!

FPS J-Dogg 0wnz0rz j00

Well pirated games are becoming a big hit. I mean I will admit that I have done it because Im broke as hell. I was able to play HL2 without steam but that is a turn off, no multiplayer not even in a lan. I installed the game a couple days into it.

Rob, thats what I mean by money and time, unless we can find an easier and faster way to make games then designing such a game would take years. IMO the only way to make a game in less time would be to cut corners and use an exsisting engine (which would be a no go because we are complaining about this in the first place). The day we can shorten game making by half is the day a decent online game will be made *IMO*.