Is it just me or are most new PC games coming out as MMORPG's?

[Zalatix]

I'm being irritated enough with Blizzard poisoning single-player play in Starcraft II and utterly making a joke of it in Diablo-III by forcing you to be online all the time, and now Electronic Arts is saying the same thing will be true of the next Sim City. My wife LOVES The Sims 3 and she's worried the next version, if it comes out, will require you to be online. The warning signs are quite obvious with that new Simport feature. Mass Effect 3 has done all but make the multi-player element essential to getting a good (much less perfect) ending. Fortunately this should be the last Mass Effect game made.

But in cruising PC Gamer Online, I see most of the announcements are about MMO's, which make solo play irrelevant. Fallout has been flirting with MMO play (the Project V13 fiasco notwithstanding), and Elder Scrolls Online is in the planning stages. One has to wonder if there'll be a Fallout 4 much less 5, and Skyrim could well be the last single player Elder Scrolls game. Even X-Com is going multiplayer!


The last big single player games I see coming out are Borderlands 2, Dead Space 3, Torchlight 2 and Crysis 3, and even Torchlight's developers have been thinking of a MMO.

On the other hand if I went through the list of major MMO productions Skinner would be buying a new hard drive just to store this post.

Ugh.

[JoeyT]

1. It's not just you.

I think they figure if they make an MMO they can keep making money off the same game and its expansions indefinitely. Never mind that making an awesome single player game would give them the same benefit. We'd have bought F:NV, Oblivion, Diablo 2, or Neverwinter Nights expansions until the end of time if they'd kept releasing them.

Since the MMO market is finite, I hope after a few companies lose their asses because they can't pull enough players off existing or new competing MMOs, this trend will die. Most of the people that are willing to play MMOs are already playing them.

[Zalatix]

2. So that would explain the "you must be online to play" single player games

It must be some kind of hedge bet against the potential failure of MMO's, any one of which demands 100% of a gamer's free time in order for the gamer to be competitive...

[JoeyT]

3. It's been a while since I played MMOs,

I'd forgotten about what a godawful time drain they were. Weird, since that's what made me quit them in the first place.

EQ was the absolute worst. The raids were unbelievably long and death at high levels hurt an insane amount.