Why Titan Fall has no single player: it's your fault

What do you mean old-fashioned? Older FPS games 10+ years ago were anything but linear. If anything CoD's campaigns are the embodiment of modern "cinematic" (read: linear) game design.

@Black_Knight_00: I didn't say anything about older FPS games. COD has been going for a while now the single player experience is still the same just better graphics and more cinematics, it's old now which is why gamers don't bother with the single player campaign, no one wants to play linear on the rails cinematic FPS's anymore.

That's mostly true: they want to play repetitive deathmatches instead.

@Black_Knight_00: BK, why the **** does this thread have 70k views? WTF?

lol it's a tourist attraction. "Come to Gamespot. Come see the Titan Fall thread"

It has to be more than that. Probably a glitch.

Nah. Put anything popular in the thread title and the sheep will flock to it.

lol it's google. TitanFall single player returns your thread as the second non-sponsored result. The first is a forbes article posted two days ago. So you were basically getting all those google hits for the past five months.

@Black_Knight_00: I slapped on modern warfare3 just yesterday after months and months of neglect, haven't bothered with any of the new cods, but I must say it's quite addictive and exiharating playing against live opponents. Each kill gives you a great feeling. My online play percentage is 100% complete, single player 0%

I don't understand how google thinks, really. I mean, this thread is more or less a rant blog, why would it ever list it as the most relevant result? Shouldn't news articles from credited journalists come first?

Algorithms are idiots, never trust anything that comes within curly brackets.

Case in point.

I was hoping they were going to make some brilliant singleplayer/multiplayer hybrid when I read about their 'story' mode, but alas I've had trips to the DMV with more emotional resonance. I used to buy all the COD games just to play the singleplayer portion, which used to be really entertaining, but when I played MW2, I was like, "I'm done with these games!" Thankfully, Titanfall has re-ignited my interest in multiplayer games, and I don't know how suited the game is for singleplayer, but I can envision a badass co-op campaign along the lines of Left for Dead.

very simple: let us know if a game is primarily a multiplayer game.

for example: halo and its single player campaign does NOT apply. oh wait...

for all of you multi player fooooools: cough and burp.

halo is great because of its single player. dont ever for get that fact. otherwise, people like me would have ripped it apart long ago for it's. supposed non-story.

halo, thank you fact, is a great story (seriously, the first book is a classic), I hate multiplayer and I love the story of halo: is there anything better than being whisked away by the spark?

Single Player is the only option for some, as I don't have a internet connection fast enough to play multiplayer and there is nothing that can be done about that.

As the telecomunications structure within my area can not support a fast enough connection.

Playing multiplayer has it's frustrations and there is little suitable team work within the environment, after having been served with the armed forces and team work is the only option to staying alive.

Or can the developers producers a multiplayer game that allows the assigning of AI to members of your team. there are options that can be developed to accommodate most players

Well this is probably the biggest BS I heard to justify a colossal mistake. That is why game developers should not make ANY business decisions whatsoever. And this IS a business decision. Vince Zampella clearly forgot what all these awards Infinity Ward got were for!! Seriously? You would probably be handing out your resume to gaming companies had you made the same decision when creating Call of Duty.

It is not the consumer's problem that Respawn is a "small" studio. Then focus on "small" projects. But to decide to completely cut a huge chunk of content from a game under the BS assumption that we don't care about single player, and STILL have the audacity to ask for $59.99??? You yourself said that the majority of resources go into Single Player. In that case, TitanFall should be selling for $29.99 max.

I am glad I found out about this before I shelled out the money for this title.

From the OP nobody finishes single player? The stats on the ps4 backs that up. They tell you the numbers from the common trophy to ulta rare. Sad what the OP said is true now. The numbers are dismal, people are not finishing single player games. But who's fault is that? Maybe the devs or just maybe the new users. The new user doesn't seem to be patience enough to enjoy gaming. They want fast self gratification and a long campaign is too boring for them. What can you do?

But if you look at those same ps4 stats. NOBODY plays multiplayer either, those same trophy stats are lower than single player. I gave up on multiplayers over 5 years ago. No game dev can stop the cheating especially on pc. Skill has been long replaced by cheating. That's the arms race in multiplayers now is, who can cheat the best. Sad for gaming that's for sure...

Come on guys! no one says multiplayer is bad. it's just the game doesn't make sense without any story. Imagine games like Mass Effect or Assassins creed without any story, wouldn't you miss it! If we stick to multiplayers those nice stories will not be written anymore. Some of them were so strong even Hollywood made movies based on them, like Resident evil or Silent Hill. So you can clearly see the point of making SP mods and campaigns.

The other issue about TITANFALL or some other games similar is not having LAN ability anymore, and I belive some legend titles like Counter Strike Survived this long because of it.

I say no to TITANFALL for above reasons.

I'm glad it has no single player. This is a game focused on being a compelling online shooter. I wouldn't want it weighed down by having to place 40 development team members on single player duty.

@JonnyBigBoss:

yea, I see no need to force single player onto that game. however, if they'd like to produce a single player game in the titanfall universe then that would be great too. otherwise, millions of single player only gamers are merely going to not give a rip with this title and that's perfectly fine.

A few concerns come to mind:

Single player missions allow players to learn the mechanics of the game, practice the basic moving/shooting skillsets, learn their weapons/tools, etc (specific to that game) before entering multiplayer mode. This is esp true when they are being dumped into fighting matches against lvl 40+ players right from the get go (which is what you now see in Titanfall).

In addition, experienced players do not want complete noobs on their team anymore than noobs want to be killed off so easily by those already familiar with the game mechanics. This is a trial by fire method that leaves many people to drop the game early on and wonder what all the hype was really about.

Charging $59 for the game, but providing not much storyline or content in the form of single player missions, definitely places the rewards in the developer's hands, not the customer. They chose the shortcut route, yet how many people that bought the game knew it did not come with a single player mode?

We have had pure online/multiplayer FPS games out there for years (Planetside is just one example). Why not be clear in your marketing that is what you are offering? Few would bother with the physical DVD purchase then.

This Thread never dies

I know. We might as well have a sub discussion on why 'Brink' for all its technical flubbs actually managed to facilitate the 'multiplayer campaign' that Respawn was promising. This thing has become a price issue. Not as much as ground zeroes but still pretty significant. If Destiny also ends up demonstrating 'multiplayer campaign' the way dark souls does. I wonder how Titanfall will look then.

@ platinumking320

And Last But not least. The Division.

Damn this game is Ambitious. Unlike Titanfall, The Division is Gona feature Role Playing Elements (Or in my Lexicon, Boring Stats that break stuff)

Obviously theres going to be NPC Opponents and A homing grenade is not gona ruffle any feathers because fairness means nothing against AI but what about PvP battles ? I bet you theres going to be a Homing Accuracy Stat that the player can level up and a counter stat to defending against Homing Grenades. BOOOOOOOO ! ! ! Definately going to be some balance issues.

Lol. Destiny might have simular problem.

You know. its not really PvP if actual player skill means didly squat. Its more like PCvPC (Playable Character vs Playable Character) and the man with the moderate skill but higher stats will have the edgde.

It's our fault,I wanted a SP in Titanfall and thought it will have SP after seeing the E3 trailer.

@Black_Knight_00: Preach brother preach! This is utter garbage. Remember when they tried that crap with Ghost Recon Island Thunder... same BS.... 'nobody plays single player'... then THOUSANDS of people including me returned the game. I mailed it directly to the manufacturer and told them 'keep my money since it is the last you'll ever see of mine'. I give them credit they recanted quickly and sent me a full refund check. If I hadn't gotten Titan Fall as part of the XBone bundle I would be doing the same thing. Soooo... let me get this straight if I may? 5% of your customers (you think since how the F do you really know this? You certainly never asked me or ANY of my regular crew on Xbox Live who play nearly EVERY major shooter type title that has come out since Xbox debuted and ALL of us finish EVERY single player campaign and yes also love Multiplayer. Also so... you bought into the Microsoft 'kool aid' big time that the console should always be 'online', eh? So screw any of your customers who may want to bring along their gaming console and favorite games on a road trip in an RV, eh? Or maybe.. oh I don't know... be a serving member of the military in a foreign land who has a little downtime but doesn't necessarily have a broadband connection?

of course, there is the fact that the damn game is CONSTANTLY losing connection to the servers. Don't even try to tell me 'well it's your ISP connection, etc.'. I'm a friggin' long time senior network architect with a static IP addy and a 'fat pipe' with the Xbone sitting on a DMZ on the ouside of my fwall (which is why I have the spybot... oops sorry Privacy stealer... oopss no no sorry Kinect controller facing the wall) with a static IP address and 'first dibs' on Inet access via QoS based traffic shaping.

So screw you guys Respawn and Mr. V Zampella? Yeah you can kiss my money goodbye from now on going forward. Did I forget to mention I have two sons and 7 male nephews all 20 years and under I regularly buy games for? By the way of those 9 kids under 20 ALL of them play both single player and multiplayer. Look me up online sometime fellas Guiwhiz on a game like CoD - Ghosts and I'll show you just how much better a player becomes when they work through a single player campaign before venturing online in multiplayer. Also... yeah you know the greatest console gaming franchise of all time... the one that has made BILLIONS of dollars called Halo and made the founders of Bungie a fortune? Note that Halo - Combat Evolved had NO multiplayer and yet is still one of the greatest selling games of all time and once it came out again in a format for Xbox 360 STILL made a nice profit for the producer (at that point 343 studios and MS games, but still). Of course there is another little game called Mass Effect that seems to have done pretty well... oh and that other little franchise called BioShock... and maybe just maybe you've heard of that little money spinner called The Elder Scrolls? So either give your customers what they want and deserve OR charge a lot less for your game. Charging me full price for half a game is unethical and very non-customer friendly. Also the one thing I simply cannot fathom? You had to build the damn AI anyway for the training prologue so you have the logic already in the code you just had to build out the missions.

Well I read through every single post in this thread.... so... 5% eh? Was that the 1 in 20 CFOs of gaming companies you asked, or was it actual CUSTOMERS who spend money buying your products Mr. Zampella? I counted a total of two out of dozens who even voiced a hint of support for your position and even both of those said they enjoy a good SP campaign. That's like standing at a beer stand line at a baseball game and taking a study of people's beverage choices and saying 'only 5% would choose to drink something other than beer so we're not going to sell soda, water, or any other beverage anymore because it costs money to have those items in stock and money having room in the stand when we could be selling the clearly far most popular beverage - beer'. Edit - Ouch... this one is too funny. One of the guys I regularly play games online with saw my comment and sent me a ping telling me he also purchased the Titanfall bundle XBone and even though the game was essentially FREE he deleted it to save room on his Hard Drive after playing for an hour or so and couldn't take the constant disconnection from server and with no SP... no reason to keep it. Brutal if that is the trend line.

@guiwhiz: Good to see there are still people who care about single player.

@Black_Knight_00: Yeah man. Anyone can look at our internet dead zones, and see we're being sold snake oil.

All these megapublishers have to do if they're afraid of losses, is stop gimmicking about. If they're afraid gamers don't finish single player, then they can look at the anger over Mass Effect 3's ending and why people wanted to finish it.

Those big heads really should admit theres no shortcut or quickfix for emotional resonance, and not push tone deaf games, with boring characters that gamers have no incentive or drive to finish. A shame that only experienced devs understand this.

Unfortunately the Mass Effect 3 rage is a moot argument: publisher very well know the RPG userbase who plays Mass Effect or Skyrim or Dark Souls buys them for the single player experience. Case in point: what I have observed is that the core of audience interested in The Elder Scrolls Online are people who already play a lot of MMOs rather than the offline RPG player looking for a multiplayer experience.

The problem right now lies in the shooter department: the core audience for CoD, Battlefield and Titanfall are kids, teens and young adults who only buy one game a year and only play multiplayer (or zombie mode) with their friends ignoring campaign and other single player modes. This is why CoD Ghosts has no Special Ops and Survival modes, which in the previous two IW CoD games were apparently only played by a smaller slice of the audience despite being excellent.

In this age of massive budgets, everything non essential is being cut, especially if it doesn't land itself as a springboard for DLC and microtransactions. See Titanfall which has normal team deathmatches with a few wav files playing the background and they call it a "campaign". In other words: they pee on your boots and they tell you it's raining.

omg... i swore i wasn't going to touch this topic again cause last time i got banned for posting on it but i just gotta say, good gosh why is this argument still going on and why hasn't a mod locked this flame fest yet?

sad truth and bottom line- if you like sp games "as i do" keep playing the few that come out every so often, perhaps if we can increase sales enough they'll keep making them. if you're an online multi-gamer congratulations! you win! your method of gaming is taking over "and ruining imo" the entire industry, there is nothing we can do about it, and soon gamers like myself will have nothing left to play.. good for you! ;)

For todays generation, I would look at why we kept playing fighting games long after arcade mode was done. That incentive was character mastery. Even hack and slashers had that mastery and upgrade incentive. old school shooters focused on level mastery and secrets. Current devs should align hot weapons, perks and growing experience to mastering the campaign.

The incentive to finish single player shouldn't be 'skinner box' impulses, but curiosity, character and power mastery. Far Cry 3 sorta went back in that direction. A lot of the stuff (like special weapons, and moves) they want to sell as DLC should go back to being the carrot on a stick in single player.

And even though Sandboxes are a big expense, it hasnt stopped Ubisoft otherwise they'd given up like Zampella and gone that MP only route. They know as long as the world has decent variety, people like to play that way.

For DICE, in Battlefield a smaller seperate team designed the SP for 3 & 4 away from the main group. I think those stories could've easily occurred in those sandbox maps with the same multi-player controls, vehicle freedom and rules, instead of the scripted alternatives.

seriously i've been wondering the same thing, wish to all that is holy this thread would die already.

100k*

Good idea tying multiplayer unlocks to campaign progress. Battlefield 3 did that with its special operations missions which unlocked unique weapons for MP only obtainable by playing said missions.

That said, the problem is upstream: sure, you can manipulate gamers into playing single player with the carrot on the stick of multiplayer unlocks, but that's not demand, it's getting people to do a chore, like with achievements/trophies. We still have the problem that a lot of people don't want to play single player because they find it boring.

If we want more from single player, the demand for it must increase and the standards with it, while the way I perceive it, the current trend with many gaming demographics is going in the exact opposite direction.

Y'know...I would mind this thread hitting 500k or more. We've seen FAR worse discussion click bait get too much traffic in the forum world.

Some people from the other four corners of the world will google, come in and leave their thoughts, but this topic involves, pricing, principles and game mechanics, it can easily be segwayed into larger important community discussions about gameplay value.

Sorry for adding to this, but yeah. While while BF3's special ops are an example. I feel they were still putting incentive largely on the multiplayer. (Of course) For so many FPS, the single player world isn't intimidating or versatile enough by itself to hold interest these days. People come in expecting they're on a tour ride. When single player is more of its own versatile beast like a Bungie or Ubisoft title, that would be better.

@Black_Knight_00: I don't think it matters that much that Titanfall does not have proper single player. The majority of players only want it for the MP and it did make a pretty great MP that wouldn't have been as good if they had spent time making a single player campaign.

I do hope that this also happens in reverse though where a good single player game can be made without the need for a tacked on MP that no one needs.

We've known for like 15 years that shooters don't need single player campaigns. It's like putting a story mode in a fighting game.

Problem was that the FPS got sent back to the stone ages when consoles took over; they had to sacrifice the trajectory of games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament in order to make a profit off the dual analog generation.

Fortunately that generation seems to have been weened off of single player experiences... Unfortunately that generation still seems content with bad controls and boring weapons.

Titanfall isn't good, but it is progress. The shooter has finally climbed back up to the Heat.net era. Just without the benefits of community mods and maps and ladders and servers...

Actually, never mind. A long way to go still I guess.

Might need a bit of perspective there. The mechanics used to fight shoot or whatever can be facilitated well whether its a human or computer. Folks just programmed A.I. lazily after the rise of MW2. Shooters just need to let the environment tell the story, make most everything interactive. and leave the on-rails bullshit for light gun arcade games.

Fighters weren't online multi player for a long time, you couldn't always have friends over for one on one, and people still played by themselves long after finishing arcade mode. How else did certain players get so good at em? Because getting better, and mastering every move and technique was a draw in and of itself. If people don't have the opportunity to get a feel for all tools, and vehicles of a game in SP but get shoved in a server with level 40+ people who'll smell noob, likely punish em for dragging down their match, or mechanics that inspire new cynical players to cheat, that can also prove to be an exclusive frustrating experience.

The only difference is whats harder. Making a closed multi player arena centered around typical attrition/king of hill/deathmatch. Or designing a clever widespead labyrinth with good pacing with tricks, traps, suprises that force most people to stop and re-consider their approach.

I think Far Cry 3's SP was actually the sign that things were looking up. Everyone now concedes open world was always better than ridiculous on-rails. With enough variety sandbox shooters can be fun no matter whether its online or with good A.I.

Quake 3 arena was more of a concession from John Carmack when Romero left because Romero and Tom Hall were ones known for creative level design at Id, intially when Carmack proposed Quake 3 Arena being MP only to the rest of the Id team they were furious.

Jesus, who cares? If they want to make a multiplayer game, let them. Sometimes multiplayer-only games are fun. There will always be story-driven games, including shooters, and there is quite an appetite for them. The likes of Deus Ex, Half Life, Bioshock and others have conclusively proven that. Besides, Titanfall looks to be a bit of trash anyway. If the lack of single player upsets you, then don't buy the game and go purchase something more single-player focused, like Half LIfe 2, or hell, even one of the Riddick games. If you really wanted to "fight the industry", you'd just not buy the game so that your money wouldn't be going towards future lackluster titles.

@platinumking320: Exactly. Developers need to merge strong narrative with open ended gameplay and soon. Get people interested in SP once again. The alternative is unacceptable.

@lumzi32: Ok, i'm not saying saying the PC market has been completely desolate, but it is dwindling. Even some of those games you mentioned are console only. I agree there are still a lot of single player games, but again its dwindling. A lot of games coming out are more and more multiplayer based which is cool but at least include a single player option. Thats my issue with Titanfall. Make a game with high replay-ability so even if a person were to blow through it quickly, they could go back and change things, do things differently or see a different outcome. The GTA series has been pretty good with that, same with a few Telltale games. It just irritates me that they completely ignored the people who actually enjoy a single player campaign or story mode. I understand this is only one game, but this is just the start. Guaranteed it will start happening more and more in the future. Might as well just make this game an mmo.

Just when you think this thread has died... NOPE!

@ Black_Knight_00

Excellent craftsmanship. Your thread has stood the test of time. :D

@Black_Knight_00: To quote Bebe's kids 'This thread don't die. It multiplies.

Extra innings ya'll!

It'll be funny bringing this back when Titanfall starts collecting shelf dust, and people are playing destiny though. ; )

That wont happen :D

What's Titanfall...?