Do games NEED multiplayer?

If you want to be able to play one game and one game only for the next year of two of your life, then yes, multiplayer is a necessity. Sure, there are single-person experiences that seem limitless (Spore, The Sims, Tetris) but eventually you need something more. Why do you think the Sims have had expansion after expansion after expansion? In today's A.D.D. world of YouTube and an MTV that has lost it's "M," people need constant, updated stimulation. Online multiplayer is one easy way to accomplish this.

Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Call of Duty: World at War - the top three online games on 360. They will remain this way for the forseeable future. CoD 4's single player was great - the scripted action was intense, the characters were believable, and the sense of immersion in the battles was unparalleled. Yet, there is no reason to play it more than once. The experience will always be the same, no matter the difficulty level you select. But online, you can meet new people, and shoot new people. The experience will never be scripted; the experience will never be the same. Online multiplayer has helped WoW become a pop culture phenomenon, and one that's doesn't show any sign of letting up. A game can be fun, but without online multiplayer, there is no reason to keep getting better and better indefinitely. If you invested 200 hours into Final Fantasy XII to get yourself the sweetest, toughest party in RPG history, who will know? Who will care? I sunk 120 hours into Oblivion, and now it just sits on the shelf, collecting dust. At least I got all 1,250 achievement points!

A distant cousin to online multiplayer is the increasing availability of online leaderboards. Rock Band, Mirror's Edge, Mega Man 9, N+, basically every other XBLA game... by getting people to compete with each other to shave half a second off a speed run, single player games are given incredible long term vitality. Mega Man 9 came out months ago, and people are still competing for the top spot on the leaderboards. How many full-budget games can make that claim? Not as many as would like to, that's for sure.

Tipping the Scale

Scale has always been a strange technical issue in video games. You're limited by the size of the character, and the camera angle, and the hardware. In old NES games like Zelda 2, Link was the same size on the world map as an entire village. Once he was actually in the village, the buildings were bigger, yet the inside dimensions never seemed to match the outside, like that magical car from Harry Potter that could seat seven comfortably in the back seat while appearing to be a standard size from the outside. Later (much later), Final Fantasy VIII graced the PS1, and towns were finally getting a sense of scale. Sure, Squall still appeared to be as tall as the buildings while outside the city limits, but at least they weren't the same dimensions anymore. I just think it was the hardware. The one game I can think of in that entire console generation that had an entire world set to scale was Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. If you wanted to walk somewhere, it took you as long as it would in real life. It was improved even farther in Oblivion, and we now had a living, breathing world that resembled our own, if our own world had goblins lurking behind the registers at Wal-Mart.

Come to think of it, first-person-perspecitve games were always in scale. But the scope of the levels was always so constrained. Remember the first TimeSplitters that debuted with the PS2? The one where you didn't even have to look up or down, a la Doom? The levels, especially compared to sprawling RPG's like anything Square produced, were miniscule. Luckily, technology and game budgets nowadays are so out of control that even low-impact games can have a sense of scale and verisimilitude. Unless its Nintendo, then you're still doomed to be stuck with the kawaii big head, little feet, Pep Boys look. Hope you sprites have been working out your neck muscles! You're going to need them.

We'll fix it later.

When Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was first released on PC, it was apparently a buggy, near-unplayable mess. Instead of thoroughly beta-testing, Bethesda released an unfinished product and then released patches throughout the months following its initial release, eventually forming it into the masterpiece it is today. PC gamers have been dealing with this for years. A game ships, there's a lot of problems with it, people complain to the developers, the developers release a downloadable patch to fix the bugs. Console games didn't have that luxury, until recently. When a game was released on any system before this current console generation, that was it. If there were bugs or glitches, they stayed in consumers' games and minds for eternity. You made sure you released a finished product, because there would never be another chance to restore the public's confidence in you. Now that every system is connected to the Internet (except the Wii... ha!), game companies can release patches even before a game hits retail shelves. I've bought games on release day and ran home and popped it in, only to be informed, "An update is available for this game from Xbox Live. If you decline the update, you will be signed out." What the crap is that? A game is broken before it even ships? In today's disposable society, nothing is immutable anymore. Now, it appears that games are called "software" because they are always susceptible to outside forces molding them into something other than their original form. I don't like it. I miss the days of good ol' fashioned game cartridges: sturdy and eternal. Now... sometimes it just seems that nobody tries as hard as they used to.

Soundtrack of my life. Or at least my games.

When you repeatedly hear the same music with the same actions, you forever associate them with each other. I always listened to Sugar Ray's self-titled CD when I mowed the lawn or played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on the Game Boy Advance. Now, certain songs on that CD make me feel like I'm out mowing in the hot hot heat or skating around the rooftop level as Tony Hawk. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was a sublime game, but the music was... lacking. The minimalist soundtrack with a heavy emphasis on ambient nature sounds and footsteps was a huge turn-off for me. Luckily, 360's let you import your own CD's onto it to make a custom soundtrack for your games. I would travel all across Cyrodiil while bumpin' Cold War Kids. Now, whenever I hear their music on the radio or play their CD in my car, I picture the beautiful landscapes of Tamriel and the often ugly faces of the hundreds of NPC's in the game. It's like a subconscious music video. It's hard to hear Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" and not picture the dark gymnasium from the music video. I have unintentionally linked Oblivion and Cold War Kids in my mind, and it's not a bad thing. It gives imagery to the songs, even if the images conjured up are not the intended ones.

Another game I've remixed is Fable II: Pub Games. Barely a game at all, Pub Games' tedium is almost eliminated by listening to Beck's Modern Guilt while spinning the slot machines ad nauseum. Almost. Also, I want the prizes and achievement points! Anything that helps me mellow out after a long hard day is a winner in my book.

Fallout 3 is an improvement over Oblivion, I guess. There is a radio on the game that constantly loops often-humorous reinterpretations of old-time music. If I would hear that music in real life, I would be transported in my mind back to the world of Fallout 3, the way the game makers probably intended. Still, I wonder how long before I started playing some Radiohead in its place...?