Personally I don’t think it’s too scary (apart from 3 specific situations, like the dentist that suddenly stands directly behind you after you’ve picked up an plasmid…). I find SS2 way more scary, actually the scariest game ever.

The only online-shooter I’ve played for longer than just a month is Battlefield 2, which I still love but I don’t have the time and energy to do it on a regular basis.

I had a quick play of the ET:QW demo which, amusingly enough I didn’t take online and was put off because the bots were too hard, but yes its completely asymmetrical. I should take another look at it.

Its strange that I tend to play games such as UT, ET, etc offline. If they hadn’t come with bots then I almost certainly would play online as with TF2. I’m not sure if its a fear of loosing (my bots are usually set to provide a challenge enough that I really have to fight to win) or that I’m not keen on socialising with generic online trigger happy idiots, because both points are put down by my MMO playing where I happily PvP and they certainly have their share of idiots.

Another point I’d quickly like to make is that with my own sort of ‘if I could develop a game this would be it’ idea, it works well with both SP and MP, but I’ve always thought I would likely make the games separately.

I agree that SP and MP should be seperated and I have lots of games with MP support that I’ve never tried online.

And yeah I agree with you, Dan. You put it better than I, it’s not the development cost, it’s a question of polish.

However its all down to maximising the market potential (especially with games like Call of Duty and Halo where most people bought it for SP but some bought it just for MP). Its also about maximising the life of a game. Dare I mention the Deus Ex multiplayer, thrown out there just to extend the life of the game (which luckily already had a superb SP experiance).

I would suggest however the issue is not the cost of adding multiplayer, as Assassins Creed is no cheaper than UT3, but more to do with refinement. I would rather developers spend longer concentrating on polishing the single player than start working on a multiplayer element.

Conversely, if people only made single player or only made multiplayer, there would be no CoD or Halo. I think it just needs common sense.

EER:

I agree, we need more co-op games, even if its just tacked on to the single player. I’d also like to see more asymmetrical team games, such as some of the maps in TF2.

Looking at all the great games out this year, there are games that managed to have solid SP and solid MP, such as CoD4 and possibly Crysis, but a lot of games either had no MP, bad MP, or bad SP. The best multiplayer games had no SP or just failed miserably at the SP component, such as UT3, TF2, or Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It just seems more and more like the best way to go is to sell the SP and the MP seperately, so people like me can only buy the SP portion and people who want MP can get that or both. Digital Distribution™ makes this a viable concept. And I would definitely pay good money to buy a co-op component in addition to the singleplayer campaign.

I think I’ll go write a follow-up entry to this, but I’ll be forward-dating it for Friday, because there’s already a post in the pipe for today.