"Screens"

I can only celebrate the fact that Gears seems to be the one shooter franchise that doesn't bend backwards to accomodate its multiplayer at the expense of superb singleplayer mechanics. Everyone should probably just pack in the first MP thing with every subsequent game in a series and let the game itself actually evolve. I'm so fucking tired of SP having to tip toe around *actual progression* these days because MP needs to be balanced.

Can you give some examples of this? I'm not aware that it actually happens. You can do things in single player that don't translate into multiplayer.Indeed. Gears of War was fucking fantastic.

To be honest I barely know an example where it hasn't happened unless I pick something thoroughly single player that doesn't even have mp.


I think the most illustrative point is to look at what happened to Halo with 2. The dual wield and shield regen went into Halo 2 and then they needed to keep the core experience more or less identical for Halo 3. Sure you got a whole bunch of accessories and what have you, but the main thing was to keep the mp intact or their biggest audience - with little investment in the sp or story - would be upset. Of course that audience was *still* upset with Halo 3 because of the changes they did make.

Halo ODST was the one to introduce Halo 2 levels of changes. The altered gameplay structure and pace, giving you a powerful silenced pistol that would probably blow mp minds, giving you a bunch of new core weapons and giving you the visor based risk/reward layer of information/visibility which you had to use in moderation. Movement and health management also changed dramatically again. With absolutely no responsibility to play like its mp component, they actually made some exciting core changes.

Reach retained at least some of ODST's bolder moves, but they were gimped and ultimately didn't affect that experience much.


When Halo 3 was shown off and people were disappointed after Condemned's animation tour de force it really wasn't surprising in retrospect. Halo will NEVER dare move away from its popular mp component, and subsequently it will never make any meaningful changes to how it feels to play or how it progresses through its campaign unless they make an offbeat ODST thing again and actually dare make changes to that stuff. I would frankly be surprised if even Halo 4 will carve out its own identity. Call of Duty and its ilk are even more hopelessly stuck being totally identical, however dramatic the things it does with external scripted madness are.

I'm not 100% convinced Gears has the balls to move out of its mp audience's comfort zone either, but 2's campaign makes bigger strides at a core, mechanic level than most shooters with a popular mp component do, and Cliffy B has sorta been hinting at some sort of RPG layer to Gears 3. Meanwhile the bigger innovations keep coming from games that have no mp to adhere to at all, which of course in today's rental/sellback climate no shooter actually wants to be.

Nobody does the shooter where you actually grow anymore (unless mp-less, and you get a Bioshock or a Deus Ex). No shooter ever introduces meaningful changes to its formula as you go on. You're stuck in stasis from the moment you turn it on and it plays identically throughout with weapons that are always interchangable for different "tactics", rather than using anything close to a modern interpretation of the Doom weapon progression where you kept getting new and balance-defyingly BETTER guns all the time. The attitude is more and more that of the "arcade mode" in a fighting game where they simply pit the mp mechanics against AI opponents for X amount of time and roll credits.

This is all fantastic if you're an mp dude, but it's really disappointing how utterly stuck in a rut all these mp-also things are in fear of alienating their fan base. And mp does the social WOW thing, easily generating more fans than an actual story you invest in ever will, so it's just a matter of time before the game is completely devoted to its mp component should that actually catch on, because that's where the money is. Splinter Cell Conviction's number one objection? No spies vs mercs identical to Chaos Theory's mp.

That's just it! They took it out and didn't put it back in until ODST because it messed with mp.

So.. Halo.

And honestly, it's not really the fault of the multiplayer layer of those games that the single player doesn't change. There's no reason that the single player and multiplayer portions of a game have to be identical. See: Splinter Cell. Call of Duty was never going to be anything more than a digital shooting gallery. Don't blame multiplayer, blame unimaginative game designers. I can't even think of very many good multiplayer games that also contain good campaigns. They're rare. With that rarity I don't think we can actually say this is a terribly wide spread issue.

And Gears of War becoming a better SP/Co-op experience doesn't mean that the MP has to suffer either.But that's not actually MP's fault. I can think of a bunch of shooters where weapons from single player don't even exist in MP and vice versa. Hell--They do this in Bad Company and Call of Duty! Games that barely qualify as actual campaigns. I'll concede that this absolutely happens, but there's absolutely no reason that it has to.

And for what it's worth, dual wielding wasn't very good on any level. Halo 3 didn't need to be so very close to Halo 2's design to work or we'd never have games like Reach and (bleh) ODST.

No, essentially all shooters with popular mp components. Halo just makes for the best example because it actually has points were it diverts from the formula enabled by the LACK of mp.


It's not ODD. It's wholly understandable that mp fans want things to stay exactly the same and it's not feasible to split a game into two. It's just that sequels in other genres and in other franchises with no mp duties dare take drastic measures to give the sp component a meaningful upgrade, not just a new slew of levels to play through. The changes from Killzone 1 to Killzone 2 were *major*, and it's even fixing the retarded weapon slot problem of 2 now with 3. Had KZ2 caught on to where they're making a game people SKIP the campaign in they would've been scared shitless of fixing the weapon slots because the mp crowd expect it to be that way.

It's incredibly frustrating that mp is becoming this sellback combating virus, and the sole relief is that it's usually not working because people don't latch on to it in a big way. With franchises where people DO, however, it pretty much freezes the game in that incarnation, and numbers and textures and geometry will change but nothing else. Unless they make a spinoff of some sort that they'll have to market with a sticker for MULTIPLAYER BETA FOR THAT OTHER GAME THAT IS WAY MORE THE SAME THAN THIS ONE on it.

But this is on a happy note! Because yeah, I don't think Cliffy B is that concerned with keeping Gears static to appease mp dudes. I think they're making the best possible co-op, cover based shooter first and foremost, and that is nice for a change.


EDIT: And this was all a reply to "so.. Halo." and now I gotta poo.

It is feasible! It happens! There are weapons that behave entirely different in Call of Duty 4's campaign versus multiplayer (G3, for example) and gear that exists only in SP. There are games like Splinter Cell where the split is even larger. People have tried it. It works just fine. Are there really even that many shooters with popular multiplayer components that have good campaigns? That's a pretty sparse list of games. I think your examples are horribly flawed, since Call of Duty has changed more as a multiplayer game than it probably ever will as a campaign experience... as has Halo in its most recent version. So if the game needs be static to appease "multiplayer dudes" than why the hell are the multiplayer modes evolving at a brisker pace than the single player portions of the game?

Indeed. It's like it's somehow part of my point.

Then your point is contradictory and doesn't make a lot of sense. Single player becomes frozen because of multiplayer that's evolving at a brisker pace? How are those even compatible ideas? Keeping Call of Duty as an almost on-rails shooter in its campaign is somehow dictated by their multiplayer modes? Come on...

You're blaming the wrong things. You should be complaining about how focused these devs are on multiplayer as a general statement. There's absolutely no reason that you can't grow a campaign and keep things balanced for multiplayer. It happens as frequently as developers try to make it happen.

The problem is that multiplayer becomes the focus when the games sell to more people based on that multiplayer. Progression of sp mechanics would be WAY different from a design standpoint and stop happening, whereas mp structure to enforce the mechanics already in there becomes paramount.

My point is and has always been the problem that occurs when mp becomes more important to the core game than the singleplayer. The kind of advances other, new games are bringing to the shooter genre roll off the shoulders of the games that are devoted to their mp because they'd affect that core they're so protective of at that point.

It's not economical to develop two games concurrently and put them in the same box, that's why it never really happens. It has happened, but that's been with games were SP is still the main thing and the mp is outsourced, as was the case with Splinter Cell and GRAW.