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The Mystery of the Vanishing Game
Posted on Tuesday, October 30 2007 @ 22:35:28 Eastern

I was reading one of the articles in Gaming News and saw that Call of Duty 4 has a ridiculously short single player campaign. The article also mentioned the sub-par efforts of Heavenly Sword and Halo 3 when it came to their campaigns. This started the old cogs and wheels in my brain a spinnin’: why are we seeing some less than awesome single player gaming now?

With the technology we have now, you would think we would be seeing some month long epics, telling of grand adventures that cross all ends of time and space, but instead we have barely seven or eight hours of play time. It seems to me that game developers are putting too much time and effort into the visuals of games and not paying enough attention to the story and game play. It is called a video “game” which led me to believe I would be doing some playing. If I wanted to watch a movie I would. Other times, developers seem to be relying on the multiplayer game to sell units and only begrudgingly add a single player campaign because they “have to”. I’m not against copious amounts of online cooperation/annihilation, I just wouldn’t replace a well thought out, engrossing single player story with it.

My video game experiences started with the legendary Game Boy. I played that thing during every free minute I had; it went with me whenever my family went for a trip, it was my travel buddy. My point is that multiplayer was not an option here. As I grew older and upgraded to the NES, SNES, and eventually to my lovely fat PS2, I played games mainly by myself or with my friends manning the second controller. I learned to play video games by myself and that was fine by me because I got involved with the story. I found myself lost in a magical world with flame throwing plumbers trying to save princesses or a metal suited boy shooting energy balls from his arm at armies of robotic animal enemies. These games gave me hours and hours of homework procrastination goodness. As time and technology progressed, games became larger and more glamorous. The stories became more and more lengthy with greater character development and plot twists, but now something has seemed to happen, the games are shrinking as if some plague of late onset dwarfism has broken out.

I don’t know, but I like my single player campaigns. When I buy a game, I want to sit down and be rocketed off to a far away land; I want to forget about my day and shoot some zombies in the head or slice a dragon in half. I want to have fun with the game and I want it to last. Playing a good, but short game is such a tease. The video game industry is taking away a lot of imagination and effort from the wrong places and the games and gamers are suffering because of it.

Please video game makers, tell me a story. It’s alright if it takes some time to tell, I’m an adult, my bedtime isn’t until 9:45 pm now.

Comments

jc00l
Joined: Dec 2006

Posted: Nov 1st, 2007 at 10:09 pm
wow i have to agree. Until recently i hadn't felt the need to buy Xbox live but when i bought my 360 i started to realize that in order get full value out of my games i was gonna need to pay an extra 10 bucks a month i kinda enjoy playing by myself, theres just nothing like blowing up a few aliens or zombies after a long day, sure at times nothing beats some multyplayer action,.but somtimes i like the solitude of playing by my self, and i miss the games that will completely emmerse for at least a few weeks.

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LinksOcarina
Joined: Nov 2005

Posted: Nov 2nd, 2007 at 12:28 am
You ever notice how many of the games Nintendo, Atlus and Capcom make have long campaigns? Granted not as long as the days of yore, but still pretty long, Good for them I say. We need some games with great single player experiences, because it balances out the multiplayer games.

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jivesc00ter
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Nov 2nd, 2007 at 1:05 am
agreed, i hate online play, thats jsut me, i love a good story i cant play a game that doesnt justify the killing or violence in a game, its becoming harder and harder to find this outside or rpg's which i have never found to appealing, again i'm not putting them down i just dont really care for them, but recently as link said capcom is still kicking out some solid story driven games i'm realy looking forward to metal gear and devil may cry i cant wait to see where the story goes

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LastDance
Joined: Oct 2007

Posted: Nov 2nd, 2007 at 11:19 am
Well said...I agree 100%.. Just play metal gear solid

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ShadeTail
Joined: Nov 2006

Posted: Nov 2nd, 2007 at 12:07 pm
A-MEN!!! I like cooperative multiplayer, but I generally prefer single-player campaigns. Adding multiplayer of some kind to a game won't upset me, but skimping on the single-player experience most certainly does. It's gotten to the point where my only choices are Nintendo games. They've got several franchises that tend to turn out strong single-player games. There's nothing on X-box for me, and the various Playstation platforms are getting to be slim pickings also.

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mooseodeath
Joined: Jul 2006

Posted: Nov 2nd, 2007 at 10:30 pm
sequels, linear stories and and the ever shortening game are all getting epidemic. as are rythym games with stupid controllers but i'm fighting a losing battle arguing with those

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Mediocre_Man
Joined: Jul 2006

Posted: Nov 2nd, 2007 at 11:49 pm
I agree, and I've recently been thinking about the death of the great storylines as well. I grew up playing single player games, and not much else. I'd play some goldeneye with my friends and family every now and then, but it was really too much of a hassle to get some people together who actually shared my passion for gaming, and the multiplayer got boring after a while anyway. Nowadays everyone's so focused on multiplayer that a strong mp component can inflate review scores artificially (Halo is a decent game, but it's not as good as it's made out to be), but they've only added to the problems of multiplayer gaming. sure it's a whole lot easier to find a bunch of people to play against, but there's no quality control. Now the games get boring just as fast as they used to, we just have to deal with immature, annoying kids who spout profanities faster than they can form sentances. Just give me my story mode back!

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Tyrranis
Joined: Nov 2005

Posted: Nov 3rd, 2007 at 5:44 am
Singleplayer storylines are a real asset to games, online or not. Now, obviously there are some games that have shorter storylines with good reason (I'm talking episodic games here, like Halflife 2: Episodes 1 & 2), but generally a game should have a long storyline. This is not an area people should skimp on.

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Odbarc
Joined: Apr 2007

Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
I find the 'next gen' is wholly to blame. I felt the last generation really felt around 'mid cycle' when I heard newer consoles were on the way. Didn't PS1 last a decade? Now PS2 comes out lasting only half that. The Xbox was out for even shorter before the 360 showed up. The complaint? Looking back at Final Fantasy on the PS1, we'll see that the games were so long, it required multiple CD's! FF7 had like 3, and 8 and 9 had 4, I believe. PS2? Do ANY games come in 2 CD's? Exclude .hack which is kind of 4 stand alone games (4x the money). I think Armored Core (some word after it) had an "Arena" cd and "mission" cd. The problem for the company's who make these games is; These games are so short, it's BETTER to rent the game for 5$ instead of paying 60$ to own it. Replay value is merely a difficulty increase (difficult as in, AI cheats. It's not 'harder' in the sense that they're smarter).

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Odbarc
Joined: Apr 2007

Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
You said it best, "game developers are putting too much time and effort into the visuals of games and not paying enough attention to the story and game play." :-: Some fun games that are in my opinion TIMELESS because they are FUN. (These are all graphically inferior games by todays standards.) :-: Super Mario Kart, Pixilated, bland view, hours of gameplay per session. Contra (3, snes). Not so much for the single player exp, but because it's so short and my bro and I are so good at the game, we try and kill each other competitively. Bomber Man (bro's favorite) (crap, g2g; I had a bigger list. ;))

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grandmagoodtimes
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Odbarc, I would just like to point out that the PS2 is now seven years old and still going strong.

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mzolkoski76
Joined: Nov 2005

Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Ocarina of Time. Greatest game ever. No multiplayer.

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ChristheFuzzy
Joined: Feb 2007

Posted: Nov 4th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
I think Knights of the Old Republic deserves a mention here. Many, many hours of gameplay, kind of crappy graphics. Stunning story. I would be more than happy to endure sub-standard graphics and unimpressive lip-synch if it meant I would get a month-long Knights game. MMOs and othe multiplayer games take away from your own personal experience. When you play Knights, you get the feeling that it's all about you. Multiplayer games take that sense of uniquity away.

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Im_Hit
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Nov 5th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Well lets hope games like assassin's creed helps with this to some degree. But it isn't really the visuals taking up so much developer time. Believe me, it's the multiplayer integration. Implimenting multiplayer takes so much time, w/ lag ,number of random events onscreen, and stat tracking. A proper stat tracking system can add months and months to the dev time. It ain't fun and many dev teams are really frustrated with their pubbies' incessant demands to integrate multiplayer in nearly all upcoming games. But I will say, Army of Two has an interesting system to make gamers and pubbies happy.

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kazam92
Joined: Mar 2007

Posted: Nov 6th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
metroid 3 had an impressive story mode. Super mario galaxy will put a halt to this growing trend

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Odbarc
Joined: Apr 2007

Posted: Nov 7th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
grandmagoodtimes; True. I still have my PS2, it's still a lot of fun. I just can't expect any of the great titles to come out on it anymore. GTA, AC, FF, DW. (My favorites.) :-: Knights of the Old Republic was a GREAT game. It was loads of fun. I just wished for more saber colors and maybe a swordsman style to mix it up with. I never got the chance to play KOTR2. I don't think there's a 3rd but if it comes out for 360, I'll hope to play that then.

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WingRider
Joined: Jan 2007

Posted: Nov 25th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
This is why I enjoy my RPGs. I'm 70 hours into Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 and still have abourt 20 hours left to go. It's really more of a partitioning of game styles into different genres.

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thetank
Joined: Jul 2006

Posted: Jan 2nd, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I blame the youth of today. The attention span of kids today is shortening as we speak, and we real gamers are subject to sub-par stories, and short games, because the future gamers out there get bored of a challenge quick smart. We're never going to see the next great epic, because only a small proportion of gamers, like the ones reading the material on the site, can actually appreciate a compelling story, and the effort that goes into completing a real game.

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