Has single-player gaming run out of steam?

Compelling online content, vast ever-changing worlds and real people to play against is driving a change in videogames
  • The Guardian,
Hellgate screenshot
Hellgate: London mixes single-gamer replayability with online

If you can play with real people, why settle for robots? That's a sentiment which resonates with much of the gaming community, if industry trends and sales figures are anything to go by. Blizzard's online roleplaying game, World of Warcraft, reached 9 million subscribers in July. Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service was a major selling point for the Xbox 360. Most recent big-budget action games support multiplayer functionality. Even some largely single-player titles - such as Neverwinter Nights - enjoy continuing sales long after release due to the astonishing amount of online content available. Are single-player, AI-driven games becoming a thing of the past?

New experience

Chris Early, studio manager of the Microsoft Casual Games service and Live representative, is even-handed in his judgment. He thinks single-player gaming still has its place but that the execution is important. "There are narratives and stories you can tell through single-player experiences that you simply can't tell through multiplayer," he says. "At the same time, there are experiences you can't deliver in single-player that only multiplayer can achieve. More often than not, when you play a single-player game, once you're done with the game, you're done. But with multiplayer games, the content, in part, is created by the actions of the other players. It's a completely new experience every time you play."

The presence of other players gives multiplayer gameplay a significant advantage over its AI-driven cousins in terms of replayability. But that doesn't mean developers aren't coming up with solutions. If there's one upcoming single-player title that could profess to provide a completely new experience each time you play the game, it's Flagship Studios' Hellgate: London. Built entirely upon randomised content, the virtual demon-infested London through which players will be traipsing will have a different layout each time. Essentially, Hellgate offers infinite replayability.

"We love randomisation," says Bill Roper, Flagship's CEO. "It adds so much replayability to the game, as there is always the chance that a player will find something new, or emergent behavior will create a new experience. When done right, randomisation doesn't come off as being random - which is kind of an odd way to think about it. Basically, you don't want your environments to feel haphazardly slapped together. You want them to feel cohesive and coherent. This sort of thing is the real challenge and art of creating a highly randomised game, and is why you don't see many of them. If you get it right, it looks really simple. But it's very hard to get right."

Tellingly, though, Hellgate also supports an extensive multiplayer component. "One of the unique things about Hellgate: London is that it is both a standalone, single-player experience," Roper notes, "and an MMO when you go online. The single-player version of the game provides somewhere between 20 and 40 hours of play. When you go online, you get much more. The storyline remains - of course, you can go through it alone or with friends - but in addition to that are all the community and economy aspects of an MMO. That means you can form guilds, groups, buy and sell items to other players via an auction house and so forth. The game is a complete experience, both for single players and online gamers, but we wanted to have a model that also supported continuing content."

Supporting continuing content makes sense from a commercial perspective. Anything that can keep a game selling after release is treasured. As Early points out, though, including this content is also necessary to capture the social gamers. "The primary appeal of gaming online is people," he says. "Engaging, competing, cooperating and participating in an online community filled with like-minded gamers is what brings players back online again and again.

"The social aspect of competing against more than just computer-controlled opponents is what drives the more competitive gamers, and MMOs wouldn't suck so much time from gamers if there wasn't a strong community and social aspect to gameplay. Far and away, the most appealing aspect of playing online are the people you're playing with."

However, multiple players means that it is more difficult to tell a story. Single-player games, by contrast, are compelling in the way that the player interacts with well-crafted plotlines and characters. However, many would argue that allowing players total control over a game's story - by essentially removing story completely - cannot result in a particularly engaging narrative.

Mitch Gitelman, studio manager on Shadowrun, a multiplayer shooter, disagrees. "Social gameplay absolutely lends itself to storytelling," he argues, "but it's going to be 'watercooler stories' about the amazing move or tight win your team made last night, rather than a story created by the game designers that you're allowed to interact with.

"When you discuss 'replayability' in any given game, that replayability is usually driven by one of two things: a strong multiplayer component that makes gamers come back because every time they play online, it's a different experience, or new content that continues to expand the single-player campaign. Typically, multiplayer drives gamers to come back again and again more frequently than any sort of single-player campaign."

This is a step change for Shadowrun, where previous instalments in the franchise were highly regarded single-player RPGs. So does this move to exclusively online content suggest that single-player gaming is reaching its expiry date? Gitelman says that the move to online is the result of the team's experience with online gaming. "We leveraged the skills and knowledge of those great people to create an online competitive game with Shadowrun. It really played to our strengths and I'm incredibly proud of what the team accomplished."

Challenge for designers

So will Shadowrun return to its story-based roots? "There is definitely a market and demand for a more conventional single-player action/RPG based in the Shadowrun universe," he says. "I'd love to see it get created. But what would really be cool is a meta game - story game, in other words - that could be affected by the multiplayer play. There's a challenge for game designers."

Game designers may well take up the challenge, though the success of multiplayer gameplay could also ultimately have a beneficial effect on single-player titles as it forces developers to design more replayability.

So will AI-driven games be rendered obsolete by the freedom offered in multiplayer content? One thing's for sure: those robots are going to have to get a lot smarter if they want to compete with their flesh-and-blood peers.


Today's best video

Today in pictures

More from Inside IT