Redfall's player count has dropped so low on Steam that, if you wanted to form a full four-person lobby, you couldn't - yes, fewer than four people are playing.
To a degree I’d say this applies to anyone that works on a game except upper management. With games like these the devs/artists are almost always the passionate ones trying to put their best effort into their games but end up forced into incredibly condensed timescales by upper management.
Redfall studio job listing indicates returning focus to single-player
A job listing for Redfall studio Arkane Austin appears to indicate that the Dishonored and Deathloop studio could be returning to single-player games soon.
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
No humor/memes etc…
No affiliate links
No advertising.
No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
No self promotion.
No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
No politics.
Comments.
No personal attacks.
Obey instance rules.
No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc…)
Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
I kinda feel bad for some that worked on it. Theres places with passion, but a lot of it is just lazy bullshit.
To a degree I’d say this applies to anyone that works on a game except upper management. With games like these the devs/artists are almost always the passionate ones trying to put their best effort into their games but end up forced into incredibly condensed timescales by upper management.
Technically not true because Redfall is cross-platform with Xbox. Also it doesn’t have matchmaking anyway
F
F
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.
I also think single player games tend to be much better on the narrative, immersion and storytelling side.