Meh, I found that being good at competitive games felt more like work than fun. I play the fun way and get trounced before it could really get fun, so I switch to advance in leaderboards and maybe I could, but it just sucked because the fun stuff tended to be the less strategically wise way to go.
Even non-competitive gaming “hey, let’s all get together at 7 pm to do something on the game”, now I have “meetings” to worry about.
Single player is there when I want it, for however long or short as I want it, and can play in a fun style rather than an effective/efficient style.
I’ve always preferred single player games. I hate multiplayer, all those strangers running around in my TV, chaos everywhere. I want to relax and explore, but multiplayer is stressful. I don’t want to deal with other people.
I thoroughly enjoy single players games. I like being able to explore the world at my own pace, make my own decisions, and draw my own conclusions. It’s like reading a book, if turning the pages involved solving puzzles and beating monsters. Relaxing, if you’re good, challenging if you’re not.
Cooperative games are a close second. I like PvE, it means that I get to help my friends. The objective isn’t rank and competition, it’s winning together. It’s why I like Starbound, Minecraft, and D&D.
Genuinely? I despise PvP. It’s the trash talk and the aggressively competitive assholes who have nothing to do with their time. I hate dealing with people who like to hurt strangers by humiliating them. Who the hell enjoys that?
PvP can be honorable and joyful and rewarding too, if you don’t play with assholes.
Often times, even losing the match may leave you with a sweet aftertaste. Like, yeah, they got us, but it was beautiful and honorable and your teammates were there for you. With you.
Once you get the right people, every match will be like this. With randoms…it’s very occasional, but it happens, too.
I personally mostly use video games as a means of an escape from real life. And to me multiplayer pulls to much of real life back into games and it can be unenjoyable.
Competitive multiplayer games are a big no, but I love cooperative multiplayer games. I’d much rather play one of them with a friend or two than play something by myself. I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve actually beaten a single player game, I tend to get bored and lose interest half way through.
Too bad you need friends to do that
This is what drew me to Minecraft. Common goals or just solo’ing. And other people take great pride in showing their builds. So chill.
I wish split screen/couch co-op was back in fashion.
Everyone wants everyone to buy 2 copies and set up 2 computers right next to each other just to play, and it’s not happening. I’ll just move on. Take Two seems to be the only sane one - I’ll pay for full price for it since it has a free coop copy.
There are a lot of Couch CooP Games with only one copy and Gamesystem needed- but mostly indie games. Some friends and I get together from time to time and have a great time.
Until your horse gets blown in half…
I used to be pretty good at the usual stuff like COD, CS, Battlefield… but each game got fucked up in its own unique way. Stuff became just too sweaty and annoying, all the while the sense of community faded. COD back in the 360 days was fun. Now it’s just annoying.
These days, I’m fully single player. It’s just not worth the price of modern games to deal with all the multiplayer bullshit.
COD
A real sense of community
The community
*** you $&#ki-$ $*. $+#)$ ur ****** dark kht
I used to play mostly shooters online.
Somehow, living next to a country which is invading one of its neighbours, and seeing a bunch of actual real war footage from real wars on the daily basis, made me reconsider if shooters actually qualify as “fun” these days.
I felt the same when my friends made me play Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Civilians dying around me is supposed to be fun? Should I feel like a hero while people die like flies around me? That is a hard pass from me!
Oh, come on. It’s not bad if you play something fantastical like cyberpunk… that’s a world so far removed from reality, we’re talking corporations running the world, harsh police actions driven by corporate interest, commodification of basic health services, constant death and destruct…tion.
Well, shit.
If I wanted to be the target of homophobic insults, I could just do it to myself in front of a mirror, though granted, I can’t really emulate the voice of a 12 year-old so it’s not quite the same experience bouquet.
Beyond that, multiplayer is almost like working - you’re supposed to relentless keep at it, on somebody else’s timings even if you’re in a guild: done it in EVE Online and WoW and, frankly, for the experience of work I have real-life were I actually get paid for it rather than the other way around.
Then there’s the whole creepy monetisation shit - I’m not really interested in the constant sales pressure, especially when it’s “buy this or else you’re handicaped vs those who did” (EA is still in my shit list since they did it with a DLC in one of the older Battlefield titles), especially nowadays when I’ve managed to mainly remove advertising from my life.
So I just stopped doing multiplayer a decade ago and pretty much avoid it like the plague.
Maybe I’ll try Guild Wars 3 if it’s in the same style as Guild Wars 2 (which came out before the monetisation era).
The problem is multiplayer competition, which is comparable to gambling addiction.
The game loop itself antagonizes. It’s funny b/c in some single player games you can see that mechanic, they use it narratively and sparingly for humor.
I miss community servers. Each had its own identity and you could pop in and out without being penalized. Being locked in to a 30+ minute sweatfest with people I don’t know, or like, has never been appealing to me.
Like so many things involving the internet, things were a lot better 15-20 years ago. Dedicated servers with active admins beat the pants off anonymous “skill based” matchmaking services we’re required to use now. Yeah, it’d take some time before you’d find a server that fits you but the search was worth it - and if you wanted to put in the money and effort yourself, you could just pay a service for server space and host your own!
No need to rely on AI chatbots to take out the trash, either. If someone was breaking the rules - which were set by the server! -, the admins would just ban them. Quick as you please. Players were anonymous like they are now, but you could ban their SteamID and it didn’t matter how many times they changed their name and thumbnail, and most other games had similar options. People that stuck around made friends and built a community, while others would move on and find a home somewhere better suited to them.
I miss it.
Got drunk and played megaman 11 with siblings, passing around the controller, cracking jokes about how megaman’s ow sound seemed weirdly gay and horny in this one. I was so bad I kept getting him hurt and it sounded like a gay porn.
My sister asks “isn’t that supposed to be a robot child?”
Me: “He’s been a child since the 80s and his voice is lower now. He’s a megaMAN now, and how dare you demean the short king fighting for your safety over his robo masochim kink and short stature.”
Brother: “yea he can’t help he was built that way. You’re a monster. Don’t kink shame”
Me and bro: -glare-
Sister (who is in a poly relationship and very much the alternachick of the family): “….what the fuck is happening here?”
Single player games are still fun when played together.
Your family sounds fun lol
The live service model has been a plague on gaming and has basically killed every bit of enjoyment I’m getting out of multiplayer game nowadays. Shit’s like having a job. You leave for two weeks and you might as well be playing a different game. Leave for a month? Maybe the game don’t even exist anymore. It’s exhausting.
It’s also why they keep dying. All of them operate off a walled garden model while simultaneously demanding “this is probably the only game you can play for a while” levels of time investment and using unlockables as the carrot.
So is it surprising that players don’t want to jump ship and leave all their skins and “look at me I’m special” shiny equipment behind for something that’s not much different than what they got already?
It’s the same thing as when every Tom, Dick, and Harry were sure they’d be the next WoW. Execs never learn.
You’re not supposed to leave! Subscribe to the Steam iv nutrition service and stay focused!
I don’t play multiplayer games anymore.
First off, they always seem to enable the worst of game companies trying to financially ruin their players.
Second off, I’m in my 40s and my reaction time isn’t what it was when I used to play UT or Quake. You can’t improve an aged reaction time nearly as easily, yes, because it’s gotten slightly worse with age, but also because you become less willing and / or able to dedicate the sheer volume of time that you would need to to improve. Getting repeatedly stomped isn’t fun, and quite simply, I’ve got better and more important things to do.
Third off, I don’t like the constant recycling of content that you see in multiplayer games. A handful of maps are expected to last you infinite plays. I like changes of scenery, storylines, and varied experiences. Doing the same thing over and over again is just boring.
Fourth off, player communities in some games are aggressively dogshit and I really don’t want to interact with them at all.
Twitch reaction time isn’t particularly important in most games. Quake and UT, sure, but even in those most twitchiest of shooters strategy will still carry you into the upper echelons of players.
Counterstrike is almost entirely based on spray control and map knowledge. Twitch reactions have only a minor role to play.
Even games like Starcraft are determined primarily by strategy and not mechanical speed. You could probably play at a professional level before a lack of speed compared to your peers would actually begin holding you back.
Plus… you can train reaction time and multitasking. An actual physical impairment like RSI might stop you, though.
The whole “ohhh I can’t do games because I have the olds” is such a nonsense cop-out. The rest of your post is pretty accurate, though.
Doesn’t highly competitive Starcraft boil down to most clicks per second wins?
At the S tier level it’s both strategy and speed. Lower than that, as in like over 99% of players, strategy is more important than anything else.
It’s unlikely your reaction time has changed much in your 40s. You probably have well over a decade before that starts to happen. On your first couple of tries, reacting to something is going to seem impossible. After you’ve seen the same stimuli and practiced what you should do in response, you’ll be right around where teens and 20-somethings are. If you don’t want to put the time in to make that happen, that’s fine, but don’t think it’s unattainable to get good at a given multiplayer if you were otherwise interested in doing so. E-sports are now old enough that we’ve seen enough folks age into their 40s and remain top talent, as long as that remained an ideal career choice for them when so few are going to be able to support themselves in that career.
This also applies for some single-player games as well. I’m 48 and I had to “git gud” on Expedition 33 in order to progress - learning how to time parries is pretty critical for getting through the tougher fights.
In my own experience, now in my 50s and having played games since my teens, including a long period of RPGs and FPS online, reaction times start dropping in your 30s.
It’s a tiny bit and you only really notice it when you’re operating near your limits (same for intelligence, by the way - if you’re using it near capacity, you’ll notice that your capabilities start falling at around your mid 20s).
However, you can compensate it with experience, smarts and even wisdom - for example in FPS games you use the environment against other players, lead them into doing something predicable and get them then and/or prefer play styles that don’t depend on reaction speed.
(IMHO, the world top people at for example sports, are the ones who already early in their careers combine top physicallity with experience, smarts and wisdom)
It’s just a fact of life that physical and mental capacities do decay with age and far earlier than you seem to think, and whilst if you keep on using them it’s not that much, if you’re using them at a near peak-level it’s noticeable if you pay attention as you can’t just reach the peaks you could reach before.
The overwhelming majority of competitive games, across any genre, are determined predominantly via knowledge and skill rather than raw mechanical speed until the very highest level of play. Players who dedicate themselves to laddering will not get filtered by lack of mechanical speed until they’re already among the very best in the game.
Games that would be determined primarily by speed would become very boring to watch after the first few rounds. So developers generally don’t design games around it.
And in my experience, having gotten into fighting games in a serious way for the first time at age 30 (I’m now 37), people tend to attribute atypical “good reaction times” to what are actually smart input buffering techniques. In a crowd populated by mostly 20-somethings, I still routinely end up in the top 15% in a given game, and those opponents that beat me never feel like the difference was reaction time. Going from memory from a link I’ll surely never be able to find again, so take this with a grain of salt, the US Air Force had a vested interest in studying how reaction times change as we age and found that it didn’t really start to decay in any meaningful way until long after 40.
I’m 50 and it’s started getting noticeable in the last year or two.
Watching NakeyJakey’s video on competitive shooters put into perspective how hard it really is. I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, but that just demonstrated how not cut out for it I was.
Link please?
Probably this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbJIbdcLn6M
I used to have 50ms reaction time 15+ years ago as a teenager. Now I have 300ms reaction time according to the previously linked test. I’m not sure if it’s age or laziness though. I really really wanted to beat Zombie Goku back then and actually trained hard for it
Doing the same thing over and over again he’s boring.
That’s also a factor in the gameplay itself.
Competitive multiplayer games will always develop a ‘meta’ that you have to adhere to or respond to in order to be at all competitive.
In single player games, you can make a replay interesting by playing it a different way, trying different strategies even if they’re non-optimal, just to have the novel experience of playing the game a different way. Things like, “I think I’m going to try doing a no-vehicles run in Subnautica.” or “I think I’ll try Cyberpunk with a melee-focused solo build this time.” But stuff like that just isn’t viable in competitive multiplayer. You will be defeated early and often if you stray too far from the meta.
So not only are you playing the same few maps over and over, you’re playing the same few tactics and strategies over and over, making things boring from that angle as well.
Being a meta slave is a mindset, not often reality. There are countless examples of players taking “useless” characters or builds far in the professional scene across many different genres and games.
In single player games you can also cheat a little,bug abuse and glitch the game for giggles without ruining the exp for others too
THIS. 1000% THIS!
I’ve been having so much fun lately using shit like this to add a little spice to the games I’ve been playing.
Now, I’m a complete sucker for overpowered MC energy in any media I consume. So it makes sense that getting to personally act out that power fantasy appeals to me. As with most art/entertainment, not everyone will get the same enjoyment out of doing this that I do. But that’s ok! It’s why I love single player games, those that want to have the vanilla experience and work within the rules can, and those that want to cheese the system and goof around can too, and no one is worse off for it!
I’m 32. I just recently started getting better aim than I ever had throughout my entire 20’s. When it comes to gaming, age doesn’t really matter as much.
Well, I’m in my 50s and the previous poster is totally right about reaction speed - there comes a point were your aim is as good as it gets, but so is the aim of the kids doing the same FPS 10h/day and they’re faster than you.
That said, with age comes experience (well, can come, if you’re trying - plenty of people age but don’t learn) so you can beat the kids with smarts and wisdom (things like leading them into situations which are traps, using the environment in your favor and, more generally, just playing in ways were your reaction speed doesn’t matter).
That said, I’ve been out of the FPS genre for a decade now. Like the previous poster I simply don’t get enough fun from a game if it’s low complexity, which tends to be the case for fast paced games that require fast and/or precise moves.
Oh. It’s clear you haven’t played multiplayer games for a long time, otherwise this false statement would not have come up:
Third off, I don’t like the constant recycling of content that you see in multiplayer games. One map is expected to last you infinite plays. I like changes of scenery and story.
Maps rotate constantly and change, active and passive maps, community maps.
Oh I obviously understand that there are multiple (if not dozens of) maps, but how many times are you expected to play those maps over and over again? Without plot progression, I just don’t find it interesting.
The problem isn’t the maps being static and finite, it’s that nobody designs maps for emergent and dynamic gameplay anymore. CoD might have dozens of maps but they’re all designed for perfect sterile balance with the same lane concepts.
Some of my favorite multiplayer games have only 3-4 maps but each is distinct and plays well to different tactics. Usually they’re based around strong points and webs of approach which gives more options for fresh experience each time you play (“wow never noticed that flank” - “oh this window gives a great angle over this courtyard” - “oh a grenade can be thrown just perfectly over that building” - etc…)
In a sense, good progression isn’t flat mechanical unlocks but building up game and map knowledge. You can choose to explore different facets of the game and it always stays interesting. Competitive ranked multiplayer ruined this because going off meta means losing the game for your team.
Especially when there’s map voting. Fuck that.
Believe it or not, another 2fort \ mirage
Hot take: single player games are lame, co-op is where it’s at. That’s not to say there aren’t good single player games or I didn’t enjoy them in the past, but my evolving tastes and circumstances make me mostly skip them.
- Games in general have no respect for my time, so if I’m getting on for an extended session it’s going to be with my friends. If they do respect my time, why should I pay $40+ for an 8 hour experience when I could buy a dozen used books for that price and get more content and variety?
- Even games with compelling storytelling suffer because there’s a core conflict between who’s in control of the pacing and scene focus. What do I gain from holding a controller during the 8 hours of cutscenes in MSG4? Why play Dark Souls if I manage to miss out on 80% of the subtle world building? Does having a branching plot really make a story better?
- Putting aside narrative, games without a human element are either dopamine toys or simulators. Most games aren’t honest about that and are a palette swapped Total War, a tweaked 2D platformer, a fighting game with [gimmick], etc… It’s very rare to see innovation because innovation is hard. Even harder when you’re spending time on assets like character art, music, and world lore instead of the one thing that make games games: mechanics.
I’ll still play the odd rogue like or crusader kings to kill time, but I generally don’t feel the need to expand my catalogue unless a game looks fun as a platform for social play (friendslop as some might say).
Co-op games pretty much always suffer from the fact that adding additional humans makes each player generally worse at paying attention and learning. So the game has to be designed as if it’s for a class of slow 8 year olds.
