I’m not sure that’s really true that you’re saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it’s a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.
I get what you’re saying but FPS specifically are mostly played competitively, so a single player game in THAT specific genre in 2023 sounds like a very bad idea.
Every other genre than FPS needs more games where you’re allowed to only play single player and use tons of mods if you want to without risking being locked out of playing, though.
Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, The Outer Worlds and the older Bioware games are where it’s at for my favorite genre, to name a few examples.
flamingarms@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Fair enough, I’ll retract that part heh
flamingarms@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.
I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn’t exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they’ll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. “Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let’s get a piece of that pie.” Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.
Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot if highly competitive multiplayer FPSs doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.
It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard modern game devs to figure out how to do.