Game Informer - Long Live Single Player

Remove all ads!

Remember when the death of single player was predicted? Game Informer has an article on trend driven development cycles.

At 2011's European Game Developers Conference, industry veteran Mark Cerny rattled gamers' cages when he told a room full of journalists he believes "the traditional single-player game experience will be gone in three years. Right now you sit in your living room and you're playing a game by yourself - we call it the sp mission or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook, I just don't think that's going to last."

Cerny's prediction placed single-player gaming's death at the end of 2014. These comments were said at a time when a good majority of developers were going out of their way to include multiplayer components into games. Even the strongest of the narrative driven adventure series (like BioShock, Singularity, Batman: Arkham, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Uncharted) invested significant development resources into multiplayer integration.

[...]

Not everyone was bearish on single player at the time. Bethesda Softworks largely ignored the industry's trends and instead focused on making quality single-player experiences like the internally developed The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - an adventure players can sink hundreds of hours into - and Arkane Studios' Dishonored, an exceptional stealth adventure. Both games, which only offered single-player content, were critically acclaimed and sold well.​