Another one bites the dust
Insomniac boss Ted Price has stated that he “can’t imagine” his studio ever developing a game designed purely as a single-player experience ever again. The inexorable march toward all games being the same continues. Oh, hello Fuse!
“I can’t imagine that any game we’d do from here on out will be single-player only,” Price told GameSpot. “The game world has changed. As gamers, we’ve always been social, but thanks to the way technology has evolved, it’s much easier for us to play together. It’s much easier for developers to create experiences where you can play together. So we want to encourage that with all of our games.
“Ultimately, in my opinion, it’s often more fun to play with a friend.”
This whole “more fun with friends” thing ignores the fact that not all games are the same (yet), and not all games are more fun with others. I, for example, love The Elder Scrolls because it’s a world I can get lost and lonely in. I love a good survival horror or a JRPG because they have an atmosphere or a story that I’d rather pay attention to than have some bell-end jumping around and demanding I skip cutscenes.
Ultimately, in my opinion, you fundamentally compromise any sense of narrative in your game by having co-op. That’s fine for games where story’s on the backburner, but when co-op and multiplayer are being shoveled into games that don’t need it, that’s when it becomes a problem, and I find it sad that it’s happening to pretty much every game on block, regardless of whether or not it fits the actual product.
