After an open letter from former Bungie VP to Bobby Kotick suggests separating the two in the upcoming Call of Duty, we take a look at the proposition.
Peter Tamte, former Vice President of Bungie Games and current President of Atomic Games, is pissed. According to Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, Bungie is the last high quality independent game company out there.
In response Tamte has challenged Bobby Kotick to separate the multiplayer out from its upcoming title, Call of Duty: Black Ops and sell it at a reasonable price. While this may be a pissing match I don't care to comment on, the question it invites is interesting enough to discuss. Should multiplayer and single player games stop co-existing?
The Call of Duty series, and the Halo series, for that matter, are two excellent examples of games in which their multiplayer features far overshadow their single player offerings. Arguably, this doesn't make the single player offering worthless, just clearly the part of the package people could likely do without.
While I have no hard data, I must assume that if pressed, many fans of either series would likely ditch the single player campaign for a price decrease of the game as a whole. Technically speaking, this isn't exactly a new idea - series like Unreal Tournament and Quake have been on this plan for a while.
Seemingly this effort was effective for both, as the resulting split has produced two of the most popular PC shooters of all-time. It should be noted that with both titles, the single player quests that were once associated haven't been continued. This is likely a testament to their quality and to what users truly wanted out of the respective titles.
Some would argue that splitting the titles should offer a reduced price, which I can see as a viability for at least the first title to do so. Beyond that, given the split, it's likely that both parts that were once one would get more attention as they are subsequently their own projects; we all know this would result in a price bump, and we'd end up with two full games, rather than one at value price.
It does beg the question, would this be a preferable situation for most games? It seems that the days of games with both an engaging single player quest and multiplayer quest are long gone, so why continue to offer both when games seem only able to excel with one?
If it were up to me, I'd encourage it as the split seems logical enough. I often don't care much for the multiplayer portions of games, especially given the impersonal online approach that has now become standard. If you would've asked me the same question in the era of the Nintendo 64, I would have the exact opposite stance, but alas, times have changed.
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