I hope everyone out there in internetland had a happy Thanksgiving, because mine was freaking awesome!

I could not disagree more.

Multiplayer is a great thing, first of all.  It allows a constantly changing game experience for the players.  It can allow teamwork, backstabbing, strategy and raw power.  It lets gamers play with their best friends or with people from halfway around the world.  It can be a very, very fun thing.  But not every game needs it. I don’t think people know what they’re asking for when they demand that every game have multiplayer.

They’re asking for fewer games. Multiplayer takes time and it takes money and it takes a good chunk of each.  Multiplayer titles need map support, code support, matchmaking support, online capabilities (that actually work), art support because people want more than one character to choose from, and lots and lots of playtesting.  This is all assuming you have a game that lends itself well to multiplayer, like an FPS.  What if you’re working on an RPG?  Do you want to have a separate multiplayer campaign?  Split-screen co-op?  Should Player A’s character be able to travel to and join Player B’s game?  These are all questions that need to be answered, and then after they’re answered they still need to be implemented.  Adding multiplayer to a game can seriously increase development costs and time.  One of the easiest ways a developer can avoid going over time or over budget on a project is to avoid multiplayer.  For a small start-up or indie developer, than can make or break a studio.  If gamers seriously want every game to have multiplayer, fewer games will be released because it will simply be too expensive for developers and publishers to keep with the current release standards.

Also, some games simply don’t need a multiplayer component.  Would Final Fantasy be improved with multiplayer?  Would Zelda?  What about Planescape: Torment?  Monkey Island?  Okami?  Portal?  (Okay, maaaaybe Portal.)  As gamers demand more and more multiplayer, these excellent single-narrative games will be less and less common.  As a fan of immersive games with developed storylines, this idea makes me very sad.  I want well-written narratives and long stories in my games, and I am perfectly willing to sacrifice multiplayer to get that.  I don’t care what you do with your first-person shooters as long as I still have my adventure games!

Besides, who wants to have an important story point interrupted by some 12-year-old boy calling you a gay noob lagger?

Don’t mind if I do!

There was no blog on Monday because my internet was down.  At home, anyway, and I make it a point not to blog from work because, well, they’re not paying me to blog.  They’re paying me to move a heck of a lot of old assets from old packages into new packages, renaming said assets as I go.  That’s what I’m getting paid to do at the moment, anyway.  I did get to do some 3-d modeling and texturing earlier this week, so that was a nice break.

The thing about the internet is that you don’t realize how much you use it until it’s gone.  I’m not an internet addict by any means, and I can function perfectly well without it when I’m camping, or at a beach house, or doing things that take me away from the computer and out into the world with the Daystar.  But when I’m at home, and the internet goes out, it throws everything out of whack.

“Well, I kinda wanted to go out to dinner, anyway.  I wonder if that cafe is open tonight.  I’ll check–dammit, no I won’t.  Maybe I’ll start on that new knitting project.  I just need to print out the pattern–shit.  I didn’t save that one.  Okay, I’ll do some yoga.  Pandora has a good yoga music channel–crapdamnfart!”  Everything that I would normally do, or look up, or check on without thinking about it becomes nigh impossible.

It’s like this at work, too.  Technically speaking, a 3-d artist doesn’t always need the internet, but when it goes down a great cry rings out around the office.  With no internet, we can’t find reference for meshes we need to model.  We can’t download texture references.  We can’t authoritatively win the argument over whether the 360 is better or the PS3 is better.  (Okay, we can’t do that even when we HAVE the internet.  But without the internet we can’t link to memes and pictures of LOLcats to support our point of view.)  We geeky types love us some internet, and it’s become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that when it’s suddenly gone, we feel the absence keenly.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to SexyManButts.com.  I haven’t been able to access it for DAYS.