What Multiplayer Does for a Game

What do people like playing more than Single player? Multiplayer, and that’s the truth.  Single player is mostly the same scripted events over and over again. So scripted and predicable, you could stand where an enemy spawns and kill it before it even begins to notice it's alive. Many single player games have this problem because the developers aren’t going to try and randomize everything that happens for every single small scripted event of their game. This is why multiplayer outlives single player in almost every single aspect. The more randomized events happening, the more challenging, and entertaining the game can get. Personally I have clocked tons and tons of hours into multiplayer games like TF2 and Counter Strike, but I’ve only played the single player mode of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only three or four times since I got it years ago. It really doesn’t take a great thinker to see why though. You usually don’t watch the same movie over and over again unless you absolutely loved it. Still, even if you loved it you still don’t watch it over and over for the next three months either.


The thing about mainly single player games is that it can be quite hard to expand to multiplayer. Take the Elder Scrolls games for example. How would you make a game that is advertised as an insanely immersive single player experience, and give it multiplayer? How would you even start? What would make it entertaining? The multiplayer would obviously be lacking since the development studio is more focused on the single player aspect of the game. Then there is the fact that if single player is so focused on, why should Bethesda even include a multiplayer? It would just be an afterthought and it could lower the overall game rating just because of their experiment.


Let’s talk about a game that has benefited from becoming multiplayer, Minecraft. When it was in its early stages of development it was really fun and interesting. But what really got everyone’s attention was when it moved from being just survival single player, to survival multiplayer beta (although I personally believe it’s not really a beta, just a constantly evolving game). The reason why it's so popular and fits so well is because both the multiplayer and the single player are updated at the same time, and are basically the same thing; just one has multiple guys running around in it punching trees.


In summary, multiplayer makes some games amazing while others probably could go without. I think it’s because people expect multiplayer to be so good because most games today are centered on multiplayer action. So when people hear multiplayer, they expect it to be a purely multiplayer based game with little in terms of single player. So I guess the working combinations could be single player with no multiplayer, or multiplayer with a small single player, or single player that has an almost identical multiplayer portion of the game. Right now people just expect too much from multiplayer to actually put the singleplayer into the equation of a game's worth.