A Geek’s Lament

Originally posted at www.squirrelsofdoom.com April 27, 2011
By Matt Baker

I have a bone to pick with game developers: what the heck happened to offline multiplayer?  Where is the split-screen action in racing and FPS games?  Once upon a time, when I was a wee lad and dinosaurs roamed the earth in ripped jeans and big plaid shirts, the multiplayer experience consisted of getting together with friends, sitting too close to the TV and duking it out shoulder-to-shoulder, as God intended.   But alas, this experience seems to be fading away, replaced by larger scale online multiplayer experiences.  I’m not trying to say that there is anything wrong with online multiplayer – even though I don’t really use the feature I think it is an incredible development for gaming and it has certainly changed the way people play games with each other.  I just think it is unfortunate that offline multiplayer is being left behind.

This has been on my mind a lot lately, as Roz has come over a couple times to play some video games and we usually end up having to take turns sitting and watching the other person play.  Sure, sitting and watching someone else play has been an integral part of the video game experience  since well before Mario, but I think we can all agree that it is not optimal.  But this is easily solved, thought I!  I’ll just go pick up a couple games where we can race and blow shit up together, how hard could that be?  And so the gods laughed at my hubris and what I expected to be a simple jaunt to the store became surprisingly complicated.  In the end, I have found some fitting games, but none of them were at the top of my list.  Why is it that the best games no longer have offline multiplayer (caveat: Gran Turismo 5 does, but it is $60 and I can’t justify that to my wife – I get like one new game a year and this year it will be L.A. Noire, yet another single player game)?  It is weird to me that the only way I can play games like Killzone 2 or 3, Bulletstorm, Need For Speed: Shift or Hot Pursuit, and Red Dead Redemption with a friend is to be in separate locations.

And I think that is where my issue really lies.  I understand that developers are trying to make games more social so that you can play with like 18 other people online, and that is cool.  I mean, I have a great time playing World of Warcraft with a group of friends, but it is not the same thing.  Even with WoW, almost all of the best times I’ve had have been when Roz brings her laptop over and we play from the same location.  There is something about being in the same room as the person you are gaming with that just can’t be captured over a headset.  I think that you could even argue that this focus on online multiplayer is making gaming less social, or at least giving it an artificial socialness.  There is more to being social than just hearing somebody’s voice – after all we have four other senses, all of which are used in a great night gaming with a friend.  You can /highfive all you want, but it can’t possibly match the satisfying smack of a real high five.  Or think about the snacks you share: sitting on the couch, a bowl of chips and an open pizza box on the table between you.  It’s just not the same alone.  What about the look on their face when they have to acknowledge your gaming prowess (or in my case, when they mock me for the lack of it)?  All of this is lost when we have to play over a network.

So why are developers leaving this behind?  I recently asked this of a friend who works for a local game developer and he suggested a number of reasons this could be happening.  First, it could just be a technical issue, where running a split screen essentially doubles the amount that has to be rendered, which could be problematic for graphically intensive games.  Personally, I buy this as a problem more for some of the FPS games, where there can be a heck of a lot of stuff going on at the same time, but I’m not so sure about things like racing games.  After all, Gran Turismo 5 can do it at 1080p and looks amazing.  But that is where the second point comes in: cost.  Gran Turismo 5 is pretty much guaranteed to make shitloads of money so they can spend the cash adding in features like offline multiplayer.  As my friend pointed out, the gaming industry may be bigger than ever, but that also means it is spending more money than ever.  And because games have pretty much stayed the same price, at least since I was a kid, (in fact, when adjusted for inflation they have decreased in price) game developers actually appear to make less money per game.  So unless the lack of the feature is going to lose you significant numbers of buyers, why would you bother spending the money to include it?  After all, people will just play online and then they can accumulate trophies and everything! 

Unfortunately, we don’t all own the same games, or even systems.  And that brings us to the third, and most cynical, point: if the only way you can play with friends is to have matching games and systems more copies of those games will be purchased.  I don’t know if the game developers actually think this way, but it seems like something a company would come up with.  I honestly can’t even really fault them for it, especially considering the first two points.  But from a gamer’s point of view, it kind of sucks.  I want to play with friends, not strangers who happen to have purchased the same system as me.  And after all that, we are still left gaming apart.  Unless, of course, Roz buys a PS3 and brings her TV over to my place every once in a while.  Seems reasonable to me.