I love story-driven SP games (the Gothics are among my all time favourites) and look forward to Dragon Age very much. I would have loved it to have MP but never expected it to, so the absence doesnt affect my purchasing decision.
EDIT: Since my limited technical vocabulary makes it hard for me to put my point across very clearly I'll make this my last post on missing MP in Dragon Age.
My thought isnt that devs necessarily are lazy for not adding MP to a game, but that having a solid story-driven SP RPG doesnt have to be incompatible with multiplayer. Provided you have an
engine that can handle communication with remote players, and a game that is
balanced to have a party rather than a single protagonist (so that there is someone for every human player to control) "all" you have to do is to hand over control over the sidekicks from the AI to other players. NWN and Baldurs Gate both did this successfully IMHO. The mentioned ARPGs are built around MP engines and ignore storyline so they work well too.
The issues really boil down to: Can the engine handle network play, and can we add characters for other players to control?
I didn't mean the lag prevented her from catching up. I meant the game itself leaned heavily towards a single person progressing through the game.
Well there I dont see any difference between BG and the NWN campaigns I've played. It is still only one protagonist doing all the talking and non-combat interaction with the world. The known workarounds (MMO style quests that can be repeated) are incompatible with any kind of coherent storyline.
I liked NWN a lot more because it was basically designed for MP play. If you start the game from the beginning then there is no lopsidedness
Plus, everything ran as smooth as silk and the adventures were great together.
Then I misunderstood you, with both players in from the beginning then we are back to both players having to invest a lot of time into the game.
Was your point that the interface and control meant that NWN had a less steep learning curve? In that case I see your point even if we didnt have such problems. NWN was after all built on a few more years of knowledge of interfaces and usability
Btw, SoU and HotU will crash in MP at the end of chapter cutscenes.
That is pure laziness on the parts of the devs as similar situations work perfectly well in the OC and any claim of "focusing on SP" is in this case pure bull, the bug is simple sloppiness and should even be possible to mod away.
… Although there have been quite a few games that have tried to do too much and ended up being horrible. Dungeon Lords comes to mind. Who knows what that game could have been if they decided to put their resources to just the SP experience or reverse that and they put their resources to making a great MP experience.
Dungeon Lords problems dont come from trying too hard to implement multiplayer but from general incompetence and dishonesty on DW Bradleys part