"Single-player gaming is our focus."

[Lephys]

Too bad I don't have a pickpocketing 3, then I would have enough skill to pickpocket your terrible sense in puns.

The only problem is, I don't keep that in my pocket. I keep it tucked safely away in YOUR NIGHTMARES!

[ADorothy]

 

I agree. Theres already plenty of multiplayer games out there where you can compete with others, speak to your teammates through voice communication and do teamwork, accumulate e-**** points all at the same time. Theyre all there - World of tanks is my favorite. Single player games are needed also, sometimes you just want to chill out from all of that stuff that comes with multiplayer games.

 

Gaming started out single player, then the crazy went with multiplayer and now its maybe coming slowly back as well.

I'm sorry for the necro-post, but this seems like the most recently active discussion about multiplayer and I didn't want to start yet another thread on the topic.  I respectfully dispute the assertion there are 'plenty of other multiplayer games out there.'  The other multiplayer games are MMO's, which do not in any way operate like the multiplayer in BG, BG2 and ID did.  What I'm looking for in a game is a top-down isometric RPG that lets me use TCP/IP to include 1-5 of my friends in my group and play through the SP content.  I'm ok with only allowing one player to select dialog options because that's how we did it in the BG days.

 

There have been many RPG's created since the original BG, and many purported "spiritual successors" to those games.  None of them have allowed a simple multiplayer component like the one I described.  Dragon Age and DA2 is the best example where, just like here, the devs said "maybe later" and argued they wanted to make "the best SP experience they can."  I also don't know a single person who has ever said Baldur's Gate or BG2's single player experience suffered due to its multiplayer component.

 

I realize my complaints are useless here, since it's clear there will be no multiplayer component to this game.  But the result of that decision is I'm not going to buy it.  And I once again wait for someone to make a game that's an isometric, top-down RPG in the BG and BG2 style that has simple TCP/IP multiplayer capability that lets my friends from various parts of the world share the SP story.  I've been waiting 12 years (since Icewind Dale 2) and I'll probably be waiting forever.

 

 

And there are a ton of people out there like you, I'm one of them.  And I'm happily playing Divinity Original Sin, which seems to be shaping up to be much more of a spiritual successor or descendant of Baldur's Gate than this game.  It's also selling a lot more like BG did too (160k units in the first few days, Steam top 3 in sales since launch).

[Namutree]

ADorothy: Divinity isn't even RTwP,and doesn't play like the IE games. That's no successor at all.

[Kjaamor]

It also buys much more heavily into the co-operative experience than BGII ever did, buying into some very basic mmo ideas, and leaving several elements of the single player feeling extremely odd in the process.

 

Obviously sales are probably the best way to measure success, but the numbers of us who went "Wow! That looks amazing!", bought it, and then went "Oh, it's not", are hardly token.

 

I'm not saying that PoE will be any more a BG successor than D:OS, because both would like the tag but both are going about things in a very different way.

 

I am saying, for the purposes of the discussion, that D:OS would have been a better single player game if it didn't have the focus on co-operative play.

[sibakruom]

I am saying, for the purposes of the discussion, that D:OS would have been a better single player game if it didn't have the focus on co-operative play.

 

And that works in reverse as well, BG would be a better multiplayer game if it didn't have the focus on singleplayer.

 

At the end of the day, singleplayer and multiplayer experiences have different requirements, and having both of them in the same game will hurt one or the other, depending on design choices. The Diablo series is a good illustration of this: Diablo 2's MP suffers for the sake of its SP (mainly enabling easy cheating), while Diablo 3's SP suffers for the sake of its MP (mainly the "always online" part).

 

Or you can go Mass Effect 3's route and completely split SP and MP, at which point you effectively have two games released as one.

[Lephys]

I would definitely agree that, if you're going to put co-operative play into a cRPG like this, the co-operative play should not get the focus. Nothing in the game needs to be designed specifically for co-operative play.

[Bryy]

I fee like people are hearing "MP doesn't have to mean SP is ruined" and misinterpreting that to me "OBSIDIAN SHUD PUT MULTIPWAYER IN".