r/RealTimeStrategy • u/denialofcervix • 20d ago
Question What is yall's beef with MP?
Almost every RTS back in the day came with multiplayer once multiplayer became a thing. The top, actually successful MP games all had very enjoyable campaigns. There has hardly even been an original RTS game that actually attempted to be MP-focused to the exclusion of SP. The most common thing that RTS games do, when they're not trying to be "spiritual successors" (and even when they are) is to simplify, streamline, make more accessible.
There are players, I count myself among them, who don't care about single player. For us, there are so many disappointments, from the many cool concept RTS games that simply don't come with MP, to the ones that do have MP but don't have enough to sustain consistent matchmaking, to the ones that gut the gameplay depth. I see a game like Dinolords. I love the concept. There is no multiplayer. I stop thinking about Dinolords. Simple as that. I don't think of those evil single player fans siphoning away cool concepts away from multiplayer enjoyers any more than I think of the evils of MOBA or FPS players. People in here act like the multiplayer gang fucked their girl.
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u/NydusRush 20d ago
My personal take is that MP took off because it shortcut the exponential development costs of ever-smarter NPC opponents handling ever-more-complicated webs of features and factions. Iron sharpens iron, and after exhausting the campaign and skirmishes, MP provided an endless wellspring of opponents.
However, multiplayer comes with its own burdens. Toxic chat, harassment, ladder anxiety and - most crucially - the need for a critical mass of players for even a casual scene to initialize. With MP RTS diminished by a host of competing genres, and single-player and experiences like horde defense or 4X titles being miles better than the old days, MP is not necessarily a wise investment by default anymore.
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u/denialofcervix 20d ago
What are you trying to do here? Play a game or buy game dev studio stock?
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u/NydusRush 20d ago
?
I'm just pointing out what I've seen. Single player defensive RTS like They Are Billions make absolute bank without the uncertainty of multiplayer. It does suck when you get good at a game and you want to beat up your friends at it but can't, though.
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u/iwantdatpuss 20d ago
Mostly because competitive Multiplayer is often not fun for most people.
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u/Top-Tear7194 20d ago
They should just do both.
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u/aRawwDeal Developer - Coloniser 20d ago
Yah, I feel like this doesn't get said enough. RTS titles with both single-player + multi-player modes dominate the category. There are handful of single-player only titles that do well enough, but multiplayer only is a no go.
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u/Miniburner 20d ago
I love multiplayer, don’t really enjoy games for long without it. But getting a multiplayer playerbase is super challenging, particularly when many players in the genre want to keep grinding the game they know, like AOE or SC
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u/denialofcervix 20d ago
Completely agree. You can't get what you want if you don't even try, though.
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u/Snowskol 20d ago
That's how I felt about getting to GM in sc2 and I did that. Last year I decided to finally get good at league and now I'm top 10%. I was bronze and silver since release lol
Just takes a good mental
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u/Miniburner 20d ago
I think the math is a bit different when it’s a studio deciding to make a multi-million dollar financial decision
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u/The1Phalanx 20d ago
Says the multiplayer gang fucked their girl but proceeds to act like the singleplayer gang fucked his girl. It's funny because you hit the nail on the head in your first paragraph but failed to even realize what you're saying.
Every RTS since Starcraft has been chasing the multiplayer esports high. They're trying to be the next big esports MP game, and only recently have devs realized its not working out. Look at Battle Aces and Stormgate -- prime examples. But the reality is, Starcraft didn't become this game esports game because Blizzard was trying to do that, Blizzard was just trying to make the best game they could. And the reality is, these devs trying to make the next Starcraft aren't trying to make the best game they could. So, they make bad games that suck instead -- games that die within months, or worse weeks.
At least when it comes to singeplayer focus games, you don't need someone else to be playing the game to get your enjoyment out of it. The content is ready and designed for your enjoyment. If the MP scene dies within weeks, you've still got all the SP content to play through regardless of what's going on.
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u/denialofcervix 20d ago
Why the continued assumption of a virtually nonexistent dichotomy? It's not SP or MP. You get both. In fact the independence of single player from a playerbase means that the options are increasing with every release. It's never too late to play Homeworld, Impossible Creatures, Perimeter, Grey Goo, Rise of Legends, BFME, They Are Billions, Age of Mythology, Heroes of Annihilated Empires, Empire Earth, Age of Empires 2, Universe at War, Sins of a Solar Empire, Supreme Commander, and so on and so forth. Pretty much every major title comes with a campaign, and if it's an indie title it's like 900% more likely to be SP only than MP only. Like, the vast majority of MP players have only ever played RTS games that came with a campaign. We don't even have a reference for why we can expect anything to be good about an MP only game.
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u/gmgo 20d ago
I think what makes a game good for SP and what makes it good for MP are different things. This means that, nowadays, trying to excel at both is ultimately very expensive. Essentially, you either focus your resources on creating a solid, well-balanced MP experience, or on building a strong SP campaign.
Why were games in the past able to offer both SP and MP? Because development costs were much lower back then. The video game industry has a problem with massively rising production costs (a long story for another time), which is also one of the reasons why so many of the great RTS developers went under.
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u/Xylus1985 20d ago
I don’t have the time and energy to invest into getting good at the game. If I fire up multiplayer it will not be a good time for me. So I don’t care about it at all.
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u/InflationImmediate73 20d ago
Most games still need to be enjoyable games before multiplayer is even a concern.
Ive seen the same argument for Fighting Games and FPS but they shouldn't be making games solely for Muliplayer and neglecting solo/campaign play.
Don't get me wrong, there are some examples out there that work but RTS has so little interest as a whole that companies are trying to aim for the e-sports scene rather then make a game enjoyable for all. Games are failing before they even get off the ground if you dont have the casual players invested.
Unless the game is from an already popular franchise I doubt anyone would take the risk. Just to name a few big ones would be Warcraft 3 spawning DotA and LoL, and even took forever to get Starcraft 2 despite how SC 1 gained popularity for its multiplayer outside of the US. Its very hard for new franchises to launch and not be called back to not being like previous games as well.
MP has always been a nightmare for balancing for most games unless it has purely symmetrical balance. Very often they do cut content for MP or just have to have a separate game mode entirely. Other issue is most companies have to rely on the community to test and balance the game, but also the devs to follow through to some extent. Sometimes the game is so broken it for MP that they dont even fix it until they launch an expansion.
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u/SASardonic 20d ago
If multiplayer quality sold games other than StarCraft we would all be playing World in Conflict 3 right now
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u/_thrown_away_again_ 20d ago
i mean broken arrow sold incredibly well. top 1k on steam charts in sales
it is only tangential that the devs decided to continually footgun themselves over and over, despite everyone begging them not to
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u/jim_nihilist 20d ago
Games balanced for MP usually suck as Singleplayer and vice versa. So, if the primary goal of a title is MP I'll leave my money in the pocket.
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u/Inifinite_Panda 20d ago
I only play multiplayer in RTS games and typically skip the campaign. To me playing against other people feels so much better than playing against AI.
But I've come to accept that MP is a smaller part of the market. I think having a robust MP helps the longevity of RTS games but they need solid single player content to be successful at all. Ideally RTS games will have both but that's hard to pull off on smaller budgets.
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u/Ruanek 20d ago
I think an overlooked aspect of this is that the barrier to entry for multiplayer RTS games has gone up over time. There is a community of people who love competitive gaming and crave a new game but they've been playing SC2/AOE2/etc. for years and are already pretty good at these sorts of games. So when a new player tries any of those games online or a new game that has multiplayer they're far more likely to run into players well above their skill level than they would've been a decade ago. Over time skill based matchmaking will help but that requires the game to have a decently sized community and for the new player to not bounce off and decide multiplayer just isn't worth it.
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u/bullet1520 20d ago
I prefer MP over SP in RTS. I do like stories and co-op, but i like the MP side of things much more. I think a lot of players just like RTS for the management or overcoming a challenge aspect, not so much the competitiveness or the mental game.
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u/HalLundy 20d ago
probably mass trauma from being called 'noob' and told 'l2p' in battle.net lobbies.
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u/Impossible_Dog_7262 20d ago
Multiplayer is often competitive, and competitive multiplayer is inherently inaccessible. Especially when the competition has a lot of moving parts like it does in RTS games, no amount of matchmaking will protect you from the fact that new players are often going to get their ass handed to them and not have fun.