PSN and Xbox live downtime proves one thing

Online only games are a bad idea, if you had the crew and destiny you would not be able to play them since they dont have any offline mode, you would have a useless disc in your hands that serves no purpose, that is why I do not support online only games.

tried to play da inquisition for the first time on the ps4 today but couldn't even get to the start menu.

bioware, in their infinite wisdom, have made connecting to their servers the first thing the game does upon start but have not done some kind of timeout fallback that defers to offline mode after x amount of seconds of being unable to connect. so if you can't connect to their servers you don't even make it to the start menu. the game just keeps trying to connect. that was £40 well spent

edit: have just read it does eventually time out. i waited around 10 mins each time and gave up

-XBL and PSN are shit.

-Online-only games are a terrible idea.

-I'll never buy online-only games again.

-When my XBL and PSN subs run out, I wont renew them.

-next gen I'm cutting out both Sony and Microsoft.

I have no problem with some games being online only if that's the kind of game a developer wants to make like say Destiny, Titanfall, World of Warcraft. I just think that having an online only system would be a mistake or if the gaming industry itself went online only.

@yukushi: You can't blame this on them, this is beyond their hands. If it was them screwing things up, then you could blame it on them

If a dev wants to make an online-only game, that's fine with me. Gamers just need to be aware of the risks if they decide to purchase an online-only game. They're not inherently a bad idea, but they do come with major risks.

@yukushi: I disagree. This one incident caused by a bunch of terrorists doesn't prove anything. Online games are great. There are downsides but there are also downsides to be isolated in your game and only able to play it when someone is sat next to you. Not everyone including me has the capacity or friends to invite over. That ended when I left school. People now have jobs and families they can't come around to my house for a few hours and play games. Being able to jump into each other's game over the internet is one of the advantages of the modern world.

Saying it is a bad thing just because it sometimes goes wrong is like saying that there is no point giving people heart valve replacements or prosthetic hips because they need replacing every ten years. Just totally and utterly beside the point of having it in the first place.

@Dannystaples14:

You are missing the point all I am saying is just make the single player campaign playable in offline mode so if the internet or server is down you can still play they could have done this with the story mission in the crew and destiny.

@yukushi: I have both games but i have a bunch of other games that i can play while they sort it out, not often this happens so no big deal.

For multiplayer games like COD and Battlefield, they need to provide splitscreen and bots so you can play offline. Don't waste time making a campaign, focus on making the entire multiplayer the best it can be, like with Single Player only games.

Guess what, though? He's not blaming them. He's saying by them choosing to make their games online only (which is a stupid idea if you have a single player campaign that you can finish yourself, unlike MMORPGs), then not being able to play due to an outage is an unfortunate side effect.

Again, the outage is not their doing...

Again, he's not blaming. I JUST explained that!

An all-digital gaming future will put your hobby in the hands of any group of teenage kids with enough money to rent a botnet.

@yukushi: Yeah except that Destiny requires you to do Strikes and Raids in a group meaning the only thing you'd have to do in offline mode was story missions and patrol. Frankly they were boring enough with other people in the area let along just running around on your own.

The Crew could function in single player true but having your friends list linked into all of the skills and missions to compare scores makes a difference. That sort of thing can't be done offline.

Online games offer much that an offline game offers and a lot more on top. They might not be for everyone but there are some good advantages to online games. I am more of a single player offline gamer myself but the plus side to online games can't be overlooked.

Sometimes it is done well such as Assassin's Creed Black Flag where you have online aspects woven into the single player where if you go offline the game just reverts to a single player game but that only works if the game has plenty of offline activities to do. Many games rely quite extensively on online features though and can't really be taken offline.

I don't get how anyone could disagree with the OP, there is no excuse to not be able to play a game that you bought just because the internet is down. SIngle player in destiny may be shit, but if you bought the game you should have the option of playing it no matter what.

i don't really have an issue with games like Destiny or Diablo requiring an internet connection (and I endured the painful Diablo 3 PC launch) because that single feature protects you from the sort of account hacking we saw in Dark Souls where players would modify their own character saves and then invade your game with their hacked out toon. Server-side player storage is a good, proactive way to prevent cheating in the sorts of games where cheating of this type is so destructive to the online community.

It's annoying, but let's instead focus on the kind of gamer that makes this sort of thing necessary and the kind of morons (namely, LS) that make this sort of thing a problem when the service goes down rather than blame the people that are trying to provide a solution when there is no cure-all.

Id gladly trade a few days of not being able to play a game for the level of interaction between players that Destiny offers. If not being able to game on Xmas ruined your holiday, maybe you need to rethink what your values are.

As long as this is sarcasm the overreaction is the perfect response.

lol. It's half and half, I suppose. The last bit is probably true: I seriously doubt I'll buy the next PS and Xbox systems, and I probably wont renew PS+ unless it gets some better quality games. But yeah, online-only games are a terrible idea just because of the shit going on now. Being at the mercy of these criminals with no solution isn't exactly bolstering my faith in these services.