Over the last decade online multiplayer shooters
have become increasingly popular on consoles. What once was a fun and exciting
new mode to accompany the single player campaign has now taken center stage. In
fact the online section of these games are so popular that a large portion of
their player bases choose to only play the multiplayer and never bother
touching the single player campaigns. This has sparked many discussions about
whether or not most multiplayer shooters need a single player option to
accompany them and if they could not only survive, but thrive as a multiplayer
only experience.
A recent up and coming competitor in the online
shooter genre was willing to put these questions to the test and release an
online shooter without a single player mode for full price. This competitor was
Titanfall and it was set to be the next big thing in the realm of online
shooters. Titanfall was a success critically and commercially, although I think
that it fell a little short of expectation on both of those fronts.
This piece isn’t about that
though. This is about my personal feelings towards Titanfall. I know I wrote a review to cover that, but there was something about Titanfall that I felt warranted
further exploration and that is the following question that it left me with:
would Titanfall have been a better multiplayer game if their had been a single
player campaign?
Now, it would be easy to say that Titanfall would be
a better game if it had a strong single player campaign, as it would be an
additional enjoyable mode to experience. I mean, at the very least how could
that make it any worse? This is not what I am trying to figure out. You see in
my experience with Titanfall, one of my biggest problems was that the whole
thing felt hollow. I didn’t care about anything outside of the game’s
mechanics. I didn’t care about the universe Titanfall takes place in, nor did I
care about the environments I was fighting in, I also didn’t care about the
technology behind the Titans, or the Pilots I was playing as or the soldiers
fighting with me or the voices from the game talking to me or even the weapons
I was using (beyond the level of “which am I appearing to do better with”). Nothing
in Titanfall grabbed me and made me care.
A contrasting experience for me is the one I’ve had
with the Halo franchise. Halo is my favorite multiplayer series and I believe
that the single player had a lot to do with that. By designing Halo’s single
player first the game was given a wide variety of cool and interesting weapons
that felt distinct from one another and were meant to give the player a sense
of variety and allow them to tackle different situations, or to tackle the same
situation in a variety of ways. This not only lead to their being a number of
interesting guns and a level of strategy around which to use them in the
multiplayer, it also made the players who had gone through the single player
know all of that from the get go. Players knew what guns they were comfortable
using, what ones they wanted to find and pick up and what ones they wanted to
make sure their enemies never got. Would the energy sword be iconic if Halo was
a multiplayer only shooter? Sure, I believe so. Would it be as iconic or as
beloved by fans if it wasn’t a weapon only our enemies in the campaign could wield in Halo 1
and then in Halo 2 when you defeated one of them players had this magical
moment where they find out they can now use it too? Probably not. Would being
able to play as an Elite in Halo 2 multiplayer have mattered without knowing
Halo’s story? No, because it would just be a second character model. But you
know what? When we first got to play as Elites it was awesome because we could
finally play as our fiercest enemies. And despite how cool it was to play as an
Elite players like myself preferred to remain as Spartans because they looked
just like our beloved hero Master Chief from the campaign. There is no
connection like that to your weapons or Pilots in Titanfall, not even close.
It is important for players
to connect with a game. It is important for them to understand and appreciate
the world around them, the enemies in front of them, the character they are
inhabiting and even the weapons in their hands. I believe that a single player
campaign has the power to do this for the player when it is handled correctly
and that it is something competitive multiplayer cannot handle on its own. This
is why I believe that a multiplayer focused game still needs a single player
campaign. A good single player isn’t just something that is nice to have as an
additional mode; it shares a symbiotic experience with the multiplayer that
makes it more enjoyable for the player.
So even though online
shooters could remove their single player campaigns and still sell millions of
units at full price, just like Titanfall did, I don’t think it would be the
right move for most franchises. I feel that not having a single player
accompany online shooters would be detrimental to the player experience,
especially for any series just starting out, as players wouldn’t have had a
chance to connect to the game’s world yet. And for anyone reading this who
hasn’t given the single player a try in the multiplayer shooters that they
play, I recommend you give it a go and see if it helps build a connection to
that game’s world and if that leads to a more enjoyable experience for you as
it has for me.
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