Although this article about Saints Row 3 is a bit old, within is a comment I found quite interesting and have been saving it for when I finally got round to writing the blog again.
“Unfortunately, as with Red Faction: Armageddon, Volition has decided to remove competitive multiplayer from the game in order to put all of the developmental focus on the single-player and co-op. It stings a little, but it's kind of understandable given that every man and his FPS-playing dog will probably be playing either Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 online come November.”
I like this. A lot! I wonder how many people are slowly realising its practically impossible to take on the big FPS' with a game like Saints Row. Over recent years I've repeatedly banged my head against a wall for decisions made during production of games that I've seriously been looking forward to. EA seems to be one of the worst for it too, and not the be all and end all of 'evil' computer game companies Activision.
It's from companies working with EA that we've heard multiplayer components being forced onto games that just don't need it. They feel that without it, a game won't sell. OK, so Gears of War, Halo and most importantly Call of Duty have huge fan bases and offer worthwhile experiences both on and off-line. That doesn't mean its only way to release games. Franchises like Dead Space don't need a multiplayer, and as far as I'm aware it was basically ignored due to it never really working. People play Dead Space for bowel loosening scariness, after twenty minutes of trying to cope and they fancy multiplayer, I'd say 90% would choose to swap disks and go for some COD action then try humans vs necromorphs. Rumours have it that Mass Effect 3 will feature co-op, now this I can see as at least feasible, but can't help feeling that it's not something Bioware would have chosen to do.
For a while it even looked like Valve were jumping on this band wagon, which scared a lot of Portal and Half-Life fans no doubt, but then clarified it with 'single player plus'. Which I take to mean something like Need for Speed's Autolog where your track times get put up for everyone to see and compare to, which is quite a cool idea, though something as story driven as Half-Life it better be well hidden so I can ignore it until after the first completion like I do with achievements.
It seems that the industry got it right back at the start of the 00's with games like Quake Arena and Unreal Tournament that are specifically tailored to multiplayer. Maybe the infrastructure wasn't quite there in those days. Broadband wasn't as widespread as it is today and the level playing field of the consoles rather then the PCs, where one person with a lot of money can have the sweetest set up and in some ways get a hell of leg up on the competition.
You can already see it creeping back, Valve's own Left 4 Dead series is based around playing with mates, though admittedly the main concept is co-op there are some damn fine versus modes too. Same with fellow zombie shooter, the newly released Dead Island. Brink is basically this and why they tried to claim it wasn't escapes me. The list goes on, Borderlands, etc. Of course you can take that to it's extreme and point at MMO's too.
On the flip side, games that stick to telling a story and don't try to shoe horn in multiplayer tend to be the ones that rise to upper echelon's of their status with examples like Deus Ex and Fallout.
This leads me to believe that games need to concentrate on being what they're meant to be, rather than worrying about ticking boxes. Dead Space 2 was a truly awesome game, imagine what could have been done with the time spent on multiplayer if they stayed on mission.
And Yes I'm also aware Assassin's Creed offers a great counter-arguement to Dead Space 2, but that's a rarity, while the Dead Space 2 example could have been any number of games.
