I want to do more than win a match, I want to beat the game. You can’t beat multiplayer.
Also, singleplayer exists to entertain me personally. I can pause, quit, restart, mod, cheat, and engage in completely counterproductive nonsense whenever I like. I don’t have to worry about game balance, fairness and making sure the computer has fun.
Also, while I’m sure a majority of people in multiplayer aren’t assholes, it can seem that way when the assholes are the only ones who do anything but silently play the game.
Sometimes I don’t even fight the computer. I just need to expand the factory. And coal is running low so Ill just quickly spin up a nuclear reactor or eight
The factory must grow.
and when time is running low, I’d bring out the ole
scanmemand set my resources to 99999 just to get past the grind
Are you me???
TIL that millenials are just Gen X nerds.
I like to play online to Get Good™, but I highly prefer playing with my friends. Each of my friends is good enough at a different game to be ranked regionally or globally.
For me, always has been
Do all the shit-ass logistics I have to do to get people together for a night out, and then not go out? Or, play with a bunch of strangers, more than a few of whom are insufferable dicks? Hey, gfy on both counts.
Gen X and I like real opponents to shoot virtually so I don’t have to do it IRL. The first real multi-player FPS I played was the original Doom circa 1993. Those are some of my fondest gaming memories.
You do you though. Don’t cave to peer pressure. If you don’t want to play multi-player, don’t. I understand- the toxicity can be excessive. People who don’t sound like they’re having fun. Weird to me.
doesnt help that they make them insufferable and toxic
Older millennial, I was a teenager when Xbox live started and I spent thousands of hours in various multiplayer lobbies. I don’t play online really anymore because of I’m burnt out on either supremely toxic mother fuckers or just try hards that only want to win and not enjoy the challenge and competition of a good match. So I’ll just go where I can have fun my way, which happens to be alone, or being yelled at by best friend as he runs from a monster either one.
For me this is because I had dialup until 07
One of the coolest arcade moments I can personally recall was in the arcade at Penn Station in New York City. White, 20-something exec in a suit and tie playing Tetris head to head against a little Asian girl.
I am 36 and my wife is 35. I do not enjoy online multi-player games, and my wife pretty much exclusively plays them. I think this is about people’s specific anxieties rather than age.
Wow, are you me? My SO and I are about the same age and also have similar tastes as you and yours. It’s almost like people have different tastes in video games…
Im a middle Xer and one on one fighting games were huge. I was not into them but playing against a human was big.
Yeah and fighting games still are massive these days, it’s been great to see them explode back into the scene. However playing them online against random faceless strangers holds no appeal to me.
the major advantage that fighting games have in person is yhat it basically requires you to respect one another else get kicked out of thr venue and potentially get banned in local events. The being together in person allows comradery, and which is one of the reasons why FGC is very LGBTQ+ friendly, while things terminally online gets the worst people.
basically the level of anonymity and lack thereof of a good punishment for cheating is what holds online games back.
Well it used to be still pretty aggro in person, so anonymity wasn’t the only reason some people are assholes. Nobody was gonna get banned for anything short of destruction of equipment for the most part. That fgc is mostly gone but shows up every now and then.
why would you think its gone lol, FGC interest tends to grow every year, especially during major release years.
in fact it’s of the few communities where user demand is actually heard and met (e.g FreeMvC2 movement that spread during covid, gets a massive MvC collection announcement during the Switch Direct presentation this June.) Company relationships that have historically soured are back (Capcam and Marvel post MVCI, Capcom and SNK post SVC Chaos/CVS2 to thr point where Capcom introduces a guest character for the first time in mainline street fighter history. After previously lending Akuma for example in Tekken 7.
if anything, Fighting games have gotten bigger, and evo entrants generally show it
I honestly was never big on adversarial like that but I like coop.
that sounds like older millennials to me, tbh
younger millennials grew up on multiplayer and online games, which were widespread and extremely normalized by the time we were old enough
remember, the youngest millenials were 4 to 6 years old in 2000 and the mid 2000s was the big multiplayer boom for the industry
Halo, COD, Gears of War, Counter Strike: Source, Garrysmod, Minecraft, Trackmania, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Left4Dead, Diablo 2, all of these games came out while we were 6 to 14 years old
Younger millennial (wish me happy 30th in a few months) coming in. I had my niche group of PC nerds who played CS:S, WoW and L4D basically on release. We all knew we were dumb ass kids coming into a scene. We got verbally destroyed in Vent and TS servers when doing ESEL CSS and dunked on while learning boss mechanics in MMOs.
I was always one to just want to have fun (shout out to surf_, aim_ag, and mg_ CSS maps). But I was in the trench as a plus one in a bunch of junk. I always felt like my other group of friends were out of the loop of gaming when they would just Autoaim headshot everything in sight on console COD4 and WAW, but I never got that group to try PC
After I graduated high school I just played dota 2 for two years until I was drained from comp play, then I just started queueing/playing games without caring about my rank. I’ll check meta of what I’m playing and know a tad beforehand, but I can’t be arsed to care about a winding down activity.
Tldr: Squeakers that played Source and/or 1.6 are adults now and are tired of comp play imo. One of my core group is still a Wow head and coaches raid clears, but we are just a bunch of tired adult stoners who dick around with FGs or rogue likes now.
that’s actually a really good point too
im pretty close to your age and even i will admit that a good single player game hits better than any multiplayer arena shooter out there
But there’s a few “silent co-op” games i really enjoy. Games where i can join a stranger, help them with a quest or boss and then leave. Im the oldest of 3 and i miss beating levels for my little brothers. Elden Ring, Dark Souls , Nioh, Monster Hunter, these all scratch the itch pretty well
When many people hear “multiplayer videogame” they think mmos or cod/quake/Unreal tournament clones
i would never start playing multiplayer halo if it came out today. But theres still LOTS of multiplayer games out there that i find very appealing.
Monster Hunter World was really the last game I really got into for that reason. If soulborne games are like that I might pick up the next one.
id happily play with you. my favorite franchise.
The co-op is silent. no chat, no text. You communicate via animations and gestures
you use an item to let people know youre interested in playing together, and if another player walks by the spot, they can see and interact with your “sign” and summon you to their game
Need to get my PC running again, or get a steam deck. Seems like the latter is more realistic at this point. I’ll keep it in mind!
Younger Gen X here, sounds more like older Millennials to me, too. Multiplayer was fun when it was usually LAN parties of people you knew personally (or split screen), but once it became standard to play with strangers and/or people you’ve never met in real life I wasn’t interested.
younger millennials grew up on multiplayer and online games, which were widespread and extremely normalized by the time we were old enough
I think that one part of that shift was VoIP. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, if you were playing, say, Quake or similar online, you communicated via text chat. Subsequent to that, a lot of games acquired VoIP support, which I think helped make communication in online games more accessible to a broader audience.
But another factor that I think affects playing multiplayer games for a number of people is having kids. Like, you’re 18, you don’t have that many immediate responsibilities, maybe. But if your kid’s diaper needs to be changed or they produce some other emergency, getting an period where you can play realtime games with other people is maybe harder to get an uninterrupted time block for. Maybe slow turn-based games, like play-by-email type strategy games or something, stuff that doesn’t have the same time constraints, would be more-viable.
Older millennials and Gen X were the ones that organized a lot of the multiplayer groups on old MMOs and other multiplayer games. In a lot of communities they’re the ones that seem to reel the most whenever games make changes that break up content to make it cooperation less encouraged.
As a younger millennial who hit 30 recently, I understand the feeling of wanting to step away from multiplayer games due to toxicity. I have played games where having someone cuss at you on voice was the least of your worries due to doxxing and irl harrassment including people having their families and work places called.
The disrespect to SOCOM
listen bro i cant just sit here and name every multiplayer game from 2005
i played socom on psp and i was convinced this was the future, peak gaming
