Non-RPG General News - The State of Singleplayer Games

Henriquejr spotted an article about the current state of singleplayer games on PC Gamer:

The state of singleplayer games in 2019 so far

In 2017, we worried singleplayer games were dying. 2019 tells a different story.

There have been a few moments of panic over singleplayer games across the last several years, but a lot of this discussion emerged back when EA cancelled Visceral's Star Wars game, which coincided with the closure of the studio in 2017.

EA didn't say anything about singleplayer games specifically, but the reason given at the time was that the company was "listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace". EA's Blake Jorgensen later suggested, according to this GameSpot article, that the game wouldn't sell enough copies to justify itself.

Other factors have led to a sense that singleplayer games are in trouble: BioWare making a disappointing co-op game in Anthem instead of the singleplayer RPGs it's known for, for example. Black Ops 4 was the first Call of Duty game not to feature a campaign. GTA 5's possible singleplayer DLC was mothballed in the face of more content for the successful online component, the demands of porting the game to more formats, and making Red Dead Redemption 2. Jedi Fallen Order was marketed on being a singleplayer-only game with no loot boxes, which felt like an admission that EA had gone too far in the other direction.

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More information.

Of all sites on internet, PCgamer did the article on singleplayers, lol
A site that became obsessed with mmos and phonegames, a site that preaches i9 is the best gaming CPU and nothing else matters.
And of course, Red Dead Redemption 2 had to be mentioned.
Or EA. A company that (now) cares only about multiplayers and lootboxes.

That silly site aside, I haven't spotted any deaths, in fact there are so many awsome singleplayer games out there my backlog is growing without control for past few years. If someone was living under mmo rock deliberately ignoring what's happening outside of timewasting grinders, that's their problem.
All I know is that I play singleplayers only (just as I bet on singles only), with one exception (LoL). And I have no idea how to find enough time to play all of singleplayers I've already bought, nor can fathom how will I find enough time for upcoming ones. Singleplayers on PC.

I'm more worried about the switch to live server based semi-MMO games which is the trend nowadays. Anyway you don't see many Triple A pure SP games anymore.

So are single-player games dead as some sites write about? No but they are not abundant as they used to be. Look at the B-Industry games for SP games nowadays.

Ask yourself this when was the last pure SP Triple A RPG released? It's been a while.

Pure SP RPG, or SP pure RPG? We did get not so pure when it comes to being RPG, triple A, in form of AC cca half a year ago.
Of all companies, Ubisoft. A decade ago if someone told me this will happen, I'd call them crazy.

That was the last AAA RPG released I think, but keep in mind that everyone is saving their heavy cannons for fall or winter after they do a bit of advertising at E3.

Also, what does AAA even mean? Lemme ask you a counterquestion. When was the last time you've seen a game, any genre, any scale, any platform - with hairworks?

Nope the latest Assassin Creed is not a pure SP RPG Game.

It was designed as a live service game with online components.

Triple- A means big budget publishers who fund developers with 20+ million.

Witcher III was probably the last pure big budget SP RPG (No online at all).

Most SP RPGs with no online shit added are from smaller developers nowadays.

There kept my reply simple and omitted a lot of text.

I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey 142 hours without any online components, just single-player RPG fun, and no grinding. In my view it's the best RPG ever (taking into account that other great games such as PST have not aged great in terms of gameplay in my view).

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Ask yourself this when was the last pure SP Triple A RPG released? It's been a while.

On the other hand, you could argue that production values just changed quite a bit in general.

In the end you might have the same games still, just that they are not called AAA but AA now, as AAA is now referring to an even higher budget.
Also the definition of RPG as a genre might have shifted a bit.

Dead Red Redemption 2, Fallout 4, or even GTA titles could be called RPGs. And they are certainly AAA titles.

On the other hand when talking about the "great old times with all these AAA games"…when exactly was than and which games are you talking about?

I mean…yeah, there has been a period, when RPGs had a higher budget, voice acting in different languages and so on, maybe from Baldurs Gate (1998) up to Mass Effect 2 (2010), if you actually consider the Mass Effect series still "RPGs" or if the are already too far away from the RPG formular. But in that case it's likely Dragon Age Originsl from 2009. Since then the budget feels like it shrunk a bit and at the same time the deviation from being a classical RPG became bigger. But if you look at standards from before than, like with Fallout 2, Daggerfall, Ultima 7 & 8…
Ultima 7 actually costed 1m USD to develop, Stonekeep 5m USD.

Grant theft Auto 5 supposedly costed $265m to make, Tomb Raider 4 supposedly 75-100m ((source). Yeah "classical" RPGs don't have a budget like this these days. But on the other hand…did they ever have?

Unfortunately there are hardly any production costs known of games and the definition of "AAA" is vague anyways.

Edit: Yeah, total forgot about Witcher 3 actually.

Yeah see my point is large publisher's do not fund pure SP RPGs anymore. I wish it was otherwise and yes we do get the occasionally throwback, but that's a rare treat.

Look at EA they admitted why plenty of times already. At least Cyberpunk 2077 looks to be another hit like Witcher III, but Co-op & other online features might be added later.

They're not my cup of tea, but party-based, strategy, tactical, turn-based, bird's eye view games seem to be proliferating, JMO. Same with jRPGs with cutesy 'tweener' characters and art styles.

I wish there were more single player, 3rd-person option games out there.

Originally Posted by NFLed
I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey 142 hours without any online components, just single-player RPG fun, and no grinding. In my view it's the best RPG ever (taking into account that other great games such as PST have not aged great in terms of gameplay in my view).

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Nope the latest Assassin Creed is not a pure SP RPG Game.

It was designed as a live service game with online components.

Triple- A means big budget publishers who fund developers with 20+ million.

Witcher III was probably the last pure big budget SP RPG (No online at all).

You can completely ignore service part of AC, but yes you're correct, it does exist.

After TW3 there were at least two strict SP with budget of $20+ millions RPGs.
The first one is FF15. Sure it does have $10 bucks DLC on consoles for some oddball of online 4players coop that was given away for free on PC, but that's DLC. Not the game. The game that uses that bullshit not as 10 quids DLC but as full priced game is Destiny and it's clones.
The second one is KCD. According to wccftech, it's total budget was $36M.

Wait, is that a rice man in the graveyard? Oh wait, that's a different different story.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Yeah see my point is large publisher's do not fund pure SP RPGs anymore.

I grant the point, but I think the point is pointless. What do we care if a game is PURELY single player? The last three games I played were Tomb Raider, Yakuza 0, and Deus Ex. All are big, single player games but, oh wait! There's a multiplayer mode you can use! So now they aren't "really" single player games? Never mind the 200+ hours of play time because I could have played a multiplayer mode? That's not useful.

What I can say is that there's so much single player content out there that I don't have time to play all that I want to play. Not by a longshot. If this were the 90's, I would have finished my last new game a month ago with nothing to look forward to until September.

I've uninstalled all my multiplayer games. I'm so over mmo's it's just not funny. I don't think I will ever play another mmo, they're all exactly the same game anyway, so what's the point?

So I intend to stick to single player games from now on, but the lack of simulation and stealth games in the future is a worry (they're my fav genres as well). Still, anything has got to be better than a mmo.

Originally Posted by Tiptoe
I've uninstalled all my multiplayer games. I'm so over mmo's it's just not funny. I don't think I will ever play another mmo, they're all exactly the same game anyway, so what's the point?

So I intend to stick to single player games from now on, but the lack of simulation and stealth games in the future is a worry (they're my fav genres as well). Still, anything has got to be better than a mmo.

Multiplayer and MMO are slightly different (sorry, being a bit pedantic here ). I'm still enjoying multiplayer/co-op games with hubby but I just don't have energy and time for MMOs anymore….

Originally Posted by purpleblob
Multiplayer and MMO are slightly different (sorry, being a bit pedantic here ). I'm still enjoying multiplayer/co-op games with hubby but I just don't have energy and time for MMOs anymore….

Totally agree on this. While MMOs are out of question for me I recently enjoyed many SP games that included some form of multiplayer.

Do people consider Persistent Worlds for NWN and NWN2 MMOs? Because I've been having a lot of fun on the Baldur's Gate server for NWN2.

Doesn't matter in this thread IMO as those aren't games but mods/dlc. The article, and hopefully comments here, are about vanilla games, release versions in other words.
Not about separate/additional content that can't work as a standalone product, a content that didn't exist the day a game was released.

Yeah I'm of the same mind on mmo's as several others here have voiced, even testing Pantheon the past three years I'm not sure I'll actually play it when the game is launched. I played the Everquest games for almost twenty years, and I just don't see myself going down that rabbit hole ever again. I also don't do any multi-player games, don't think I have and doubt I ever will. Give me a decent single player game, a cool glass of water and I'm pretty happy.

Originally Posted by Kordanor

Dead Red Redemption 2, Fallout 4, or even GTA titles could be called RPGs. And they are certainly AAA titles.

They could but they wont by people who want to make a point that is not compatible with considering those games as RPGs.

I'm still a bit paranoid about the "death of singleplayer games", meaning that I'm still not convinved it might be otherwise.

Because of that I've been buying less and less games in the past apart from pure adventure games. GOG is currently my biggest resource of fun.