CiC

So, over the past year I have played alot of diffrent FPS games, Medal of honor,Call o duty's, metro 2033,crysis2,bulletstorm, wolfenstien to name a few, I got homefront yesterday and have just finished the whole game in less than 4 hours, this is a bloody ripoff If u ask me, how can software companies bring out such short single player campaigns time after time and keep getting away with it? They all just seem to be about the multiplayer, so make a multiplayer only game! With the exception of fallout new vegas, mass effect (more space adventure though) and maybe Singularity (which was class) there hasn't been many single player games which have more than 5/6 hours gameplay even on harder modes and yet they expect us to fork out £30 or more if u a console player. EA bring about 4 out a week I think!

What do other people think on this topic, feel we need a epic adventure like Half life 2 or u happy with the shitty single player modes and more intrested in multiplayer?

aparrently there wll be no Half-Life 2 Ep3, it's going straight to HL3. so you know that'll be epically long.

one of the problems your having though might be because of the obvious....

your playing them on Easy mode. Whenever i get a new FPS game i always change the mode to at least Medium. Easy mode is like a walk through. I'll put Hard Mode for first time through a game where i know it'll be a good game and i want to make it last, or i know that hard mode is more about skill (less healthpacks, ammo crates, more enemies, etc) rather than just giving the AI the ability to headshot you as soon as they see you and therefore you usually end up just spamming and not even looking what your doing.

if thats the case, then maybe you'll have more gameplay time out of new games by jacking up the skill level.

next thing is that the trends of games are shifting towards multiplayer games. it's sad imo but it's a fact, thats why i prefer FPS games like L4D where it's multiplayer and single player are basically the same thing. Consoles know that the only way they can keep up with PC games is by offering players countless multiplayer games. With Facebook, Twitter etc, PC is like a one stop shop for everything u need computer related, so Consoles need to give ppl sparkly things to look at in quick bursts so that they move on to the next product. Console games have a short shelf life anyway, very rare is there one that lasts and has replay value, so understandably, companies want to make as many games as possible.

Also there is the fact that EA are pretty much dicks, which in turn makes rival companies dicks as they have to follow the trends of one of the market leaders. EA doesn't generally make games, they buy up other companies and studio's to make games for them, and then they badge them with the EA logo. This means their decisions are corporate based and business minded. eg... "you've got this deadline, finish when we tell you so we can release it". Multiplayer can be changed and added to with updates, single player can't. So single player is made short so that they can get it ready for release, and multiplayer is made until they can't make any more, and then provide DLC and various updates later. good business model, bad for gamers, but again... you shine flashy lights with a bit of sparkle in front of kiddy gamers, and they'll buy whatever you show them, so it keeps the business model active.

The long single player games come from companies that can afford not to be bought out and take their time. eg Valve, Guild Wars, etc. Best way to buy an fps is not to look at trailers or adverts, but buy purely on the logo of the company that makes said game. though we're always lead by adverts, regardless if we think not or whatever, so that'll never happen

HL1 was huge, HL2 large but not like 1, ep1/ep2 got shorter still. Modern games are much shorter than the old ones. i think it may be that they want it to look so much more than they want it playable or long. These days i crank through single player so im ready for multiplayer anyway as i always prefer playing with friends than on my own.

pfft Easy mode! I always play them on at least hard, normally can tell in the 1st level if even thats gonna be too easy so whack it up to veteran/advanced or whatever. This was my point, even on the harder settings there still too short apart from the few I mentioned which were more of a challange on the harder settings. Fallout3 and new vegas seem to be a good example of a good single player fps, lots to do and explore and worth playing again for alt endings, also they do have DLC which adds to the life again. But they come along once every blue moon. Think thats why i play guild wars more than anything now, always something to do so good value for money.

Suppose i could stop whinging and play the multiplayer modes, but i dont have the time to play them enough and that gets annoying when a little 13yr old american shit is killing u all the time!

there's also only so many things you can do in a fps game until you get used to it and how it works, therefore it makes you a better player when you come to the next game.

HL1 seemed longer due to the puzzles it incorporated. HL2 was more about story and action, the length of HL2 is pretty much decided by your ability to drive vechicles and avoid damage. The episode games are meant to be short and are supposed to be more of an extension of HL2 rather than separate games so you can't really say they are short games since they are designed to be segments of a full game.

they cost the same as the older longer ones
hl1 gave us tfc which is still the best clan based multiplayer game of all time!
give me tfc2 and im happy. give me tf3 then im sad

can't really complain about HL2 Ep2 being short cos it had TF2 and Portal with it in the same package. if you got em solo it was like 14.99 to buy. Though even then, Ep1 and Ep2 are just as long as most other FPS games.

I think main reason games seem shorter though is cos no one knows how to put skill into a game any more. Once a gamer gets to a certain level, most single player stuff seems easy and every set piece seems the same. like "somethings going to come out of that door/vent/passageway so get ready or spam it" and something thats supposed to be hard is just stupidly easy.

When the development of games are being released every year you can expect games to become shorter and shorter. The life of most FPS games are normally added to their multi-player part.

When playing through games like Call of Duty 1 and onwards it was easy for me than it was for watching my dad play the game. I learnt the mechanics and modded for the game so it only really took me to complete the single player in like 3-5 hours when it had a play value of 7-9hours. It took my dad 24 hours but that's because he isn't a big gamer such as me. The first run though only really took me 5 hours but when Call of Duty 2 came out it took less than 3 hours to complete it.

This is the same with Half Life Episodes, because I had played Half Life 2 it was really easy to understand how the mechanics worked and how I could go through the game abusing the physics to get it completed easier. Same goes for Portal 2, I completed that in a really short time too. I see people streaming Portal 2 for their first play-through and it takes them over 36hours to complete that game. It took someone just over 4 minutes to solve the first puzzle where as it took me 1 second because I simply abused the source engine to solve the puzzle before it even began. (Chapter 2 by the way - Chapter 1 is a piss take)

Call of Duty franchises is dead and will be until they buck up a lot more with their development schedule instead of pissing around with DLC all the time for every game they release. Every game now realised on some source of payment through stupid cosmetic crap like hats (TF2) or skins and new maps (CoD). I refused to pay for any DLC of Magika and I won't be buying any DLC because of how crap and stupid the prices are.

Companies are abusing the DLC stuff and are no longer focusing on pure single player based games (EA being the biggest). Single Player is dead and all the companies know it, even the new FEAR 3 is going to have DLC which you have to pay for and even an upgrade store (unconfirmed upgrade store).

if any company deserves to charge for cosmetic crap, it's Valve. i don't agree with it, but they do it in a way that makes it ok tbh. They've setup a supply and demand type thing for unlockables and a system where you can randomly get stuff without paying, and also if you buy hats or whatever, their creator gets a cut.

but it's not because of their system that they deserve it, it's cos of the effort thats gone into making the game itself. Look how TF2 originally was 10 years ago and the development it's gone through. Also the downtime of new games valve had. They had what, DoD, CS, TFC and HL1 as their only source of funding. They didn't turn out games for the sake of turning out games. they developed games people would love and gave great support for them, then made games people would love again and didn't release until they were at a proper release state. They didn't sell out like most other companies did, like Ubisoft etc.

Greg almost hit the nail on the head.

Singleplayer games aren't dead so to speak, however they're not being invested in heavily due to piracy still being an issue. No game company focuses on the singleplayer experience anymore because of the potential threat of not making any money on it; as opposed to multi-player based systems which require authority to play on a network such as Steam, PSN, 360Live. Hence, multiplayer is a massive focus for a many multiple number of reasons.

A lot of modern games are bringing out singleplayer modes similar to the age old UT format, because it promotes offline play to learn the online play too. A lot of companies are bringing out Co-Op games to hide this fact, although they're using their MP to create their SP. Effectively cutting development time in half and still giving the player two choices, against the computer or against other real people.