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

This thread was made months before the change to the new site.

I think this is a step in the right direction. Cramming in a halfhearted and uninspired single player mode on a multiplayer focused game is just as bad as cramming in an unwanted mutliplayer option onto a predominantly single player experience.

I'm going to show an example that I think would have benefited greatly from this kind of focus. My own much beloved Halo franchise. The original game had a fantastic single player and co-op campaign, and it had a pretty great multiplayer mode as well. You know, for console shooters. I know the PC guys already had this so please don't quote this to "correct" me. I'm speaking just about the console FPS here.

When Halo 2 came out though, it was clear that the focus switched to multiplayer. Due in no small part to how popular Halo LAN parties had become with the first game. But both modes suffered for this. The single player was shorter than the first. It was far too unfocused for the story it was trying to tell. And the multiplayer would have been better if they'd put more focus on it as well. While the package of Halo 2 is fondly remembered today, it shipped full of bugs and exploits. At the time, this was all but unheard of because console patching was a new concept.

Consider how both the single and multiplayer would have benefitted from a dedicated team working on each independently of one another. If they took the UNREAL route, and split them into a Halo 2 that focused on the Master Chief and Arbiter fighting the Gravemind, while a wholly separate team focused on, for lack of a better term; Halo Tournament. Those who were interested in the fiction would have received a fitting follow up (at least in theory) while those who wanted the multiplayer could have had more options, possibly more maps, maybe even more than token customization. In the PC space, this worked well for the UNREAL franchise. Up until they stopped bothering with the single player altogether, but that is neither here nor there.

I don't mind a team choosing their focus. Because I'm not much of a multiplayer fan anyway, this makes my decision to not bother with a game all the more easy. I don't have to wonder if they did something interesting in the single player offering and be disappointed. And if I get that rarest of itch that calls me to want a multiplayer focused game, then I know where one exists that is singular in it's design.

That, of course, assumes that focusing on the task at hand leads to an experience that is made by a specialist of the craft. One could easily say that EA and Maxis focused on multiplayer for their broken Sim City game from March of this year and we all see how that panned out. But, in the case of Titanfall, I don't mind this particular thing happening because the guys at Respawn have a multiplayer pedigree associated with them. So if that's the game they want to make, I say more power to them.

I'd say it's the developer's fault for not making the singleplayer portions compelling enough to play through.

@ZZoMBiE13:

I agree....Insert BF4 here...

@Areez: I am enjoying the single player of BF4. Once I finish with it then I just going to return to my friends since I find the MP in FPS too repetitive.

The bigger problem is these devs take 6 months to make an unoriginal repetitive campaign that's only five hours long. Then they wonder why no one wants to play it.

This was more my response to the article. I get what the developer is saying about the division of resources required to generate both a strong single player and multiplayer title, but I don't agree with the conclusion that nobody is interested in Single Player because not enough people care about multiplayer. If you are looking at the stats for most MP games like COD, there is a huge swell of unique users in the first week to two weeks of release, but then that tapers off to a level plateu that's usually less than 50% of that initial burst. Is that 5% out of -all- of the unique users of the game or out of the gamers who stuck around to keep playing the multiplayer?

I love SP in games, but I haven't beaten the last several COD games. Not because I lost interested in SP, but because I wasn't that interested in -their- SP. It just got too routine.

-Byshop

Indeed. I bought MW3 to play online with a couple friends and put in something like 60 hours and never once touched the SP. Had no desire to.

I started the SP with every modern COD, but I just wasn't interested enough to finish them. Still, I'll take a solid, story driven SP game over a multiplayer game pretty much any day. MP still has it's place and I've put hundreds of hours into COD and BF multiplayer, but my preference is something with a good story and characters and this is something that you don't always get in FPS games.

-Byshop

Even if Titanfall did have SP it would be just as uninspiring as CoD or BF campaigns, as their primary goal from the start has obviously been to base the game around multiplayer, so it's hardly a disappointment. Single player sells if it's good quality content. I think Far Cry 3's the latest best example of a good single-player focused FPS doing well. I can't wait until HL3 is released, although I said this 5 years ago :(

Quoted for da truth......

Nah, but seriously Zamp ain't got put it on people like us.....b/c we didn't give a shit about the genre, anyway. Btw OP, throw it on all the ADD-riddled man-childs that seem to avoid playing SP like a plague. I'm guessing they might be the *real* culprits....just sayin'.

For the genres/games I like/love to play, I don't have any problem enjoying SP, whether they be on console (of course I do game on Sony platform, so they do tend to level at bit more variety/creativity in the games on there....not flaming or anything, just saying my opinion) or PC.

I always play singleplayer though.

I will never in my life buy a game with no Single player.

I just want a decent sequel to HalfLife 2.5 and to Deus Ex 3, Crysis 2 and 3 failed to live up to Crysis 1 but were still entertaining. I dont think any people would care if COD didn't have a single player portion, BLOPS was still my fav COD. I havent played BLOPS 2 but the CODs have gotten way too repetitive and need to take a break from themselves honestly. I dont care much for multiplayer games but Titan Fall does look amazing.

Here's the problem with multiplayer only games. After a year or so of people no longer playing the game online, the game DIES. It DIES. Can you imagine a game no longer being sold or wanted because no one else is playing it? If Titanfall is honestly going to be supported throughout the lifespan of Xbox One (we're talking at least four years), then... maybe it was a good decision, but I honestly don't see that. Single player should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS come first. The team definitely could have made an interesting single player campaign, but instead shirked an entire audience of gamers because "no one plays single player anymore". No, it's just most of us single player gamers don't like paying 60 dollars for multiplayer games with tacked on five hour campaigns.

I did, once: I bought MAG and in 2 months that game will only be good as beer coaster, as after the server shutdown you won't even be able to access the main menu of that bloody thing.

True. Most of the CODs I've played were borrowed from friends,just so I could beat the single player and then gave it back. However I've bought all the Bioshocks, HalfLifes,Stalkers, Crysiseseses, and well anything I thoroughly enjoyed where the Single Player is the meat of the game, and I'm one of those gamers that does multiple playthroughs of really good single player games.

Why "fXXk this industry" ?

Particular when someone finally has seen the light and doesn't pretend to make something that is crap anyways and clearly is just a "something we have to do"

Because this is bloody brilliant and something i hope the devs of CoD and BF and any other primarily mp game takes to heart.

And if its because you are worried about singleplayer , don't be because its fine and there are plenty of great single player games out and there will continue to be that.

@JustPlainLucas: I still say it's fine to focus on the multiplayer. If that's the experience they want people to engage with, why not? People wanting a single player game know not to bother with it now. There is no question of whether or not the single player will validate the purchase, you just know to look elsewhere.

Also: Hi Lucas! Good to see you buddy! :)

Will they? EA has been talking about switching to a fully F2P business model for a couple years now, so has Ubisoft. F2P games are in 90% of cases multiplayer. Multiplayer games are cheaper to make: just make new maps and new guns and sell them as DLC. No need to hire writers, actors, and creative game designers. no need to invest in researching new advanced AI. No need for all that QA and bug fixing that single player entails.

Single player campaigns are a huge investment and the new generation of gamers doesn't much care for them, focused as they are in grinding levels and climbing leaderboards in multiplayer. Gaming companies would be more than happy to make the same amount of money by investing much less making MP-only games.

Don't take single player for granted.

@Black_Knight_00: fps don't need single player missions now they'll try to mix up the single player missions in multiplayer still no issues as i'm more of a multiplayer :)

It sucks for sp only gamers such as myself.

Oh well one less game to play.

Hi. :)

To quote Herbert Simpson, "You are not providing people with what they want; you're TELLING them what they want!" This game looks AWESOME! I want to play it, but ... I'm a single player gamer, so apparently, I don't play these kinds of games. I don't want this to keep happening. I don't want TitanFall to set the precedent, making it seem like single player games aren't profitable. I don't want games to become ghostly hollowed shells a year or two after release. Hell man... they're even taking story mode out of the new Smash Bros. It's never fine to focus on the multiplayer, because it makes the product feel like half a game. I should never feel like I need to look elsewhere when someone's trying to sell me a game.. .

I think it's a good call. No one really does the SP Campaign in war games anymore. I played the Black Ops 2 SP Campaign once and never touched it again. These games shine on MP way more than they do SP. I do feel bad for people without internet though. Maybe if they turn the SP into an offline MP like they did in games such as Quake III Arena and Turok Rage Wars, then everybody can enjoy the game. Set all kind of difficulties for the bots and have a friend over sometime to play when you're offline like the old days.

I'm interested in this for the mp as this is where most of my game time will be so still getting it but would have been nice to have a single player campaign to go along with it but it has to be fun don't care if it scripted or cookie cutter or whatever if I enjoy playing through it for the hours I'm playing I'm satisfied.

I remember this thread. :P Single-player games still won't die out any time soon just because of this science fiction CoD clone. SP may lose ground as online gets more lucrative but right now I don't see it happening. Good on the devs for going the cheap CoD route. I'd say they know their playerbase if they are cutting SP and it still sells like hot cakes but I don't expect incredible reviews, 10's all around

Online console FPS may trend but as others pointed out, it will never just replace the single-player scene singlehandedly unless the game is so good it's the next coming of Jesus. I'll admit knowing next to nothing about it except it's robots and parkour in space in CoD but I won't be supporting that game anyway because I don't care for online FPS anymore. Used to love Quake and CS. Quake Pro 110 FOV :P

Now this is just my opinion but I really don't get the hype for this title. Don't get me wrong, it looks cool, but I'm not really a multiplayer guy and when I see this, it's just Call of Duty with jump packs and Mechs as far as I can tell. People were so hyped about it I went back and watched the E3 footage again because I honestly thought I had missed something. I was much more intrigued by Sunset Overdrive and Dead Rising 3.

Anyways in short don't worry about it. My problem is I feel starved for good, high budget RPG's lately! *shrug*

I play games for the singleplayer, heck i play singleplayer on games like Battlefield 3 because i want to try it. But most casuals and some hardcore guys skip it

Well, this is the first year i didnt buy CoD or BF4 - simply due to the short campaigns. And some suit somewhere will see the declining sales and call a meeting to confirm his expert gaming knowledge because he is really in touch with the gamers and show a pie chart to the team and say "see, our single player sales are declining." - neglecting to notice thats its because us SP lovers can't justify $60 for a 4 hour tacked on campaign. I'm not in the game industry but i am in corporate america and see these out of touch decisions being made daily. Even when the other suits disagree they pipe up and say "you called this one Mr Bossman. Its like you have espn2 and can see the future Mr Bossman. Great call bossman. You're the best bossman. Hey, btw, is that management position still open ? I think i would be a good candidate bossman"

Single player shouldn't come first in a series that has built its reputation on multiplayer. That would be like if the Tomb Raider developers decided to start focusing on multiplayer. Nobody wants that and we would get angry. Why should the exact opposite of that be any different?

Maybe because developers keep making crap singleplayer modes with story thinner than paper? Make a great, captivating campaign and people WILL play it like many millions love Halo because of its campaign. Vince should just deal with the fact he is not good at crafting storylines and building campaigns instead of calling them a waste of time and blaming us for his inadequacies.

It doesn't really matter for this particular game. It's going to be a game with great multiplayer. The single player would have sucked anyways.

Yeah. They know the value to SP. The industry still wants to maintain at least some small aspect of that post-Wii 'everybody wins' philosophy, especially with the mobile market challenge.

and look at it this way. Sooomebody has to die online. Somebody has to have a shitty day online for the rest of our experiences to be meaningful. You can't just pop in for a 'light' session when you're exhausted after work. There is no normal mode or warm-up, there's just whatever's coming to yo' ass.

Imagine if all were just MP, because thats what companies make the most off of. Imagine if Tekken had no ghost modes shooters had no bots and you had to connect just to play anything, and the worst of the cheap arseholes are online all that week, maybe the whole month. It might as wellve been a crappy game and altercation at the blacktop. That becomes the beginning and end of your experience.

Of course they will , also F2P is not as great as many gamers might think, because if you look at the model its actually quite abit more "expensive" than many think, for one your assumption that they dont need staff and need to make excellent content is wrong, because what else would make you, i or anyone interested in that particular game if both EA and Ubisoft and god knows how many other small companies flood the market with f2p games.

Add to that , A f2p game also only create income when players buy their things so its not a constant "safe" income while the cost to staff, servers, maintenance ect. is pretty much a constant. put that opposite to a single player game where you have one cost and multiple income streams, its not that hard to see why Ubisoft and EA are just talking.

Also Single player campaigns are not that huge of a investment, its all up to the dev´s, because look at games like Metro Last Light, Dishonored, Witcher all from pretty much unknown dev´s and companies that had a limited budget but ended up with a far superior product to many other AAA titles with a huge budget. So if EA and Ubisoft decided to back down and go all F2p multiplayer well, i am still not worried because there are far better studios out there particular on the indie scene.

So i am not worried that Single player will go away. The market is too big for that to happen and F2p is a shitty model for most games.

No single player campaign then I am not buying it. This will turn out to another MAG and will suck.

I dunno man. I mean no disrespect, but I just don't see it like that. From where I sit, it's just trimming the fat in favor of getting the leanest cut of meat for your money. The whole thing about "setting a standard" just sounds too much like "It's a slippery slope, where does it end?". And they spelled out their reasoning with hard data. If only 5-10% of players ever even bother with the single player in games they've made in the past, and even fewer ever went past the first level or two, then it's just good sense to focus on what is driving the sales.

As a practical example; Batman: Arkham Origins. A pathetically weak attempt at a multiplayer mode. Made even poorer by the lack of effort. Controls are buggy, game modes are unbalanced and unfocused, and the end result is a crammed in mode that took months to make, was wanted by no one, and now it hurts the overall package because of it. Not that the overall package was anything to write home about, but still. I say they'd have been better focusing on what was important.

Inversely, why does Battlefield 4 need a token single player mode? So little effort goes into it, and few if any players even bother with it. Why not cut the costs of all the VO talent, mo-cap, writers, and add in a few extra maps for the things the people who like Battlefield actually care about? The idea that it won't be worth anything down the line is irrelevant. This business has kind of moved past that. If you're wanting multiplayer Call of Duty, you're not likely to go to the store this week to pick up Call of Duty: Black Ops. You're going for Call of Duty: Ghosts. And if you want a single player game, why not get one from a team that is trying to do something interesting with a single player story instead of someone splitting their focus between two modes.

A game like MAG may not be "worth" anything as a used product today, but it was never about a long term investment. It was about a quick, short term gain of fun chaotic shooter action. Maybe if more studios focused solely on what they wanted to make, we'd see less forced-n elements. Maybe it could set a standard in the other direction. If we never let developers do anything other than what we've known in the past, the industry will stagnate. Kind of like it is right now. Same games, year after year. And anytime someone challenges the status quo they get flack for it. Maybe a studio who is mindful of not wasting money on a mode they don't feel passionate about is the beginnings of making the most of the budgets and offering more focused experiences for both single and multiplayer games. I know it's hard to be optimistic following this industry, but a shake up of any kind can get the waters stirred up a bit and maybe things will come out better in some areas.

I know Titanfall looks cool. But it was never going to be about the single player action. I'm just like you, I don't much care for multiplayer focused games. But now, you don't really have to wonder if this is a game you'll enjoy. You know right up front that buying it is a waste of your time and money because it's catering to someone else. From where I sit, focusing on their multiplayer saved me $60. No matter how much I like giant robots, I'm just not likely to get my money's worth out of a title like that, so I can move on. To Destiny or something. Because Bungie's passion is a single and co-op multiplayer hybrid and it's clear they've been focused on delivering that. And because they are following their passion instead of trying to cater to everyone, they've made something that looks interesting.

Anyway, this is a fun topic. Thanks for discussing it with me. I hope I'll start seeing you around more often. Haven't gotten to chat with you much these days since the VU is gone now. Of course you're always welcome at the off-site VU. :)

I never said they don't need "staff" to make multiplayer-only games. I said they don't need writers, AI programmers, QA testers and actors (let's add cutscene programmers for good measure), which are only part of the staff but are a large slice of the cost of making a game and are expenses they cut entirely when making multiplayer-only games.

Sure there are low budget games which are excellent but this is beside the point: the point is not whether or not you can do a great game with a small budget, but rather whether or not you are willing to invest that budget in making single player content that less and les people are playing.

Game companies are not going F2P *now* because the market still has a strong enough demand for single player content, but it has already dropped compared to 10 years ago, a fact that is reflected by the average duration of single player campaign (10-12 hours in 2003 vs 5-6 hours in 2013). Today we have millions of gamers who only play multiplayer games. If the trend continues, single player will suffer even more.

Now here's the Zen riddle: is single player becoming less relevant because people are losing interest or are people losing interest because single player is getting worse? Quite a conundrum.

@Black_Knight_00:

As I said in this thread four a half months ago :).

Developers making games which only include stuff they do well and gamers enjoy is an idea so wild and crazy it just might work :P. For some developers, that will be SP, for some MP and for others SP and MP.

Throwaway modes which are merely intended to be a bullet of the back of the box are ignored by gamers and merely bloat the cost of games.

As for your claim campaigns are getting shorter, I disagree. Multiplayer focused games like CoD have vestigial, sloppy campaigns, but games like say X-com, The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite and Ni No Kuni in which the SP is the only or principle selling point boast lengthy, well crafted campaigns.

Ni No Kuni is an RPG, of course it's longer. Bioshock Infinite is long just for the sake of being long: it's a game with 4 hours-worth of content padded and stretched with interminable gunfights and red herring fetch quests into a 15 hours game. Its length is actually to its own detriment.

Also notice how I said "average" duration. In 2003 a 6 hours action game would have been panned, today it's the norm.

So does that mean the game will be half the cost? Only fair since am getting half a game.

If people are able to run through the singleplayer in 8 minutes then it's obvious the team in charge of making that part have been dicking about for 5 months.

So maybe it's their fault then.

This is a good thing for a game focused on multiplayer not to waste time with a tacked on single player that people will either run through in one or two playthroughs, or skip altogether.

If only devs making games focused on single player would adapt this same concept and stop tacking on crap multiplayer like Tomb Raider and Batman Origins. That being said, there is always room for a solid, FPS single player like BIoshock 1 or Fallout 3.

If this was true, there should have been no backlash over Microsofts 24 hour check in because it would mean everybody is always connected. Further more, Xbox Live Gold accounts only make up about 30% of consoles sold and even that's only if every system used for multiplayer only had one account. Further more, I can't think of a single retail multiplayer only console title to ever see impressive sales.

I've seen the future in my crystal ball: it was the year 2199 and the planet was a huge desert populated by mutants... and yet this thread was still on page 1 on the GD board.

unless i am wrong, Vince Sampella mentioned there is a singleplayer mode and and online mode seperately in the game, so this thread isk ind of pointless

Actually, you are wrong. Read the link in the opening post or google it. The game has no single player.

sorry i heard wrong during the interview,i knew it was online only. But i thought they changed their minds

They spoke of "giving a single player feel to multiplayer" which to me sounds like that gimmick in Killzone 3 where they had cutscenes during multiplayer and by the second match you were wishing you could skip them.

yeah i wasn't listening well to that part, i only heard campaign

God I totally f***ing hate multiplayer... It's fun for a short while but then it becomes this time/life consuming bad habit.

No more real pleasure in playing, you just play the same repetitive MP because you can, for the sake of killing time, when you could be enjoying a new engrossing story in another single-player video game.

There's also another reason I hate multiplayer (the PvP kind anyway): it brings out the jerks and can make us a lot more aggressive, put us in a bad mood and ruin our day.

Finally, f*** those guys who turn their first single player campaigns into speed runs and those in industry who use them as examples in deciding whether to continue pursuing the single player game mode.

Basically they are insinuating indirectly mandatory internet if all the games on Xbone are multiplayer. That's why I'm putting my Xbone away and not playing it anymore now that I see what they are doing. .... you Microsoft! You manipulated me into getting the system and a couple games yes but you wont make any residual money on me.