I only seem to be playing half of what I'm paying for.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with online multiplayer. I do play online on occasion, yet I rarely touch the multiplayer component of most of the games I’ve gotten in this generation.

There. I’ve said it.

If I do go online I often find myself surrounded by idiots. A reason in itself to play in a closed party, but not the reason I don’t often mess with multiplayer. It’s because I find the multiplayer portion of most games to be entirely superfluous to the experience that I like to gain from singleplayer. Fair enough some games are built around their online component. For all my bitching about Call of Duty or Battlefield, the multiplayer portions are pretty damn good and are rightly lauded. I’m just turned off by some of the people who play it. Gears of War is fabulous online, as are Forza, PGR, Tekken and Left4Dead. But sometimes there is a multiplayer component added for seemingly no reason, except that the board of directors wanted it.

For instance, Bioshock.

I know this is just one example, but it’s the one that floats closest to the front of my mind. The first game was a wonderfully self contained experience, with a strong focus on narrative and on how you approach taking down your enemies. In short, my favourite kind of shooter. Best of all it was defiantly singleplayer. Why then, does Bioshock 2 have a multiplayer segment, complete with a half hearted attempt to meld it into the world by way of making it a Plasmid test? I bought Bioshock 2 to take another journey through Rapture. The thought of shooting other people online in that city at the bottom of the sea never once crossed my mind. I had visions of the nuance being sucked out of the game and consequently never went near it. I don’t know anybody who has played Bioshock 2 who has.

The thing is, Digital Extremes, the people behind the Bioshock 2 multiplayer, have pedigree. They had a hand in Unreal Tournament, but I can’t help thinking that their talents couldn’t have been better spent on a project more given to a multiplayer setting. If you’ve played Bioshock 2 multiplayer, I’d like very much to know if it was worth your time.

Thankfully, I’ve just found out that Bioshock Infinite will have no multiplayer. It’s made me quite a happy man. Multiplayer in Bioshock 2 smacked of a decision from the publishers. Props to Ken Levine for resisting any pressure there might have been to include it in Infinite.

In a roundabout way this brings me to my point. Games are expensive. This is something that we all know. They are a considerable investment in both time and money. It is getting better though. I remember back in the deep dark hole in time that was the mid nineties when Sonic 3 came out, it cost something in the region of seventy five pounds in the Kayes catalogue we used to get when I was a kid. That’s an awfully large amount of money now, let alone in 1994. Especially when most of the people who would be playing it would have been around ten, like I was. And it was only half a game. It took the additional purchase of Sonic and Knuckles to play the what was technically the 'whole' of Sonic 3, sort of prescient in a way, what with this generation’s obsession with DLC and all.

Incidentally, Sonic 3's two player match races were fantastic.

Maybe Sega were onto something with this half a game thing though. Like I said, I don’t play multiplayer much. Conversely I work with quite a few people who buy the yearly Call of Duty and never look at the singleplayer. They live for the thrill of multiplayer and if it’s their thing then that’s cool.

 

So how about this? Why don’t publishers release the single and multiplayer portions of a game separately? That way you only pay for the kind of game you like to play. It also removes the major barrier to entry, cost. Think about it, would a game be an impulse buy at forty quid? Probably not, but personally, if I saw a new game out at twenty, I probably would pick it up. And if after playing it, the idea of multiplayer excited me, I could probably be tempted to splash a bit more for the multiplayer component.

Everybody wins. Loners like me don’t have to pay multiplayer portion they’ll never use, and gregarious types can save money by not buying the singleplayer segment of this year’s multiplayer hit, which, if the reviews for Battlefield 3 are to be believed, can be pretty inferior as singleplayer games go anyway.

Ok, maybe one or two publishers would attempt to cash in on this model by making the combined price for both halves greater than if they were just released as a combined whole, but on the flipside it might make them think twice about grafting on an un-needed multiplayer mode if there’s a chance nobody would buy it. 

And I think that could be a win for everyone.