I sometimes wonder whether I should try and get "into" a multiplayer game. All the positive buzz around Marathon at the moment has me mildly intrigued, but at the same time, it's an extraction shooter; a type of game in which the main point of things seems to effectively be bullying other players, and thus I'm not convinced I would actually enjoy it.
There was a bizarre piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun earlier desperately attempting to convince fans of single-player games — and particularly stealth games — that they should give Marathon a go. I found it rather unconvincing. While I sort of get the core conceit — that you can play solo, and that you can treat the other players as if they are particularly intelligent "enemies" — it just rang hollow to me, and it bothered me a bit.
Thing is, I often tend to find I like the idea of multiplayer games more than the actual execution of them — because more often than not, I've found that out of necessity, multiplayer games have to cut out things that I specifically like about single-player games, like, say, lengthy story sequences. Final Fantasy XIV eventually had to make certain cutscenes non-skippable to prevent impatient players racing ahead while others were trying to enjoy key story moments, for example — and many other multiplayer games simply eschew ongoing narrative altogether, lest the people you're playing with get bored waiting for you to watch a cutscene.
I just haven't found a game that really clicks with me, other than my early years with Final Fantasy XIV a while back. And so many of them are designed to be timesink "lifestyle" games that are desperate to be the only thing you play. Battle passes, experience levels, lootboxes, all that junk — all of it's designed to keep you playing that game and that game alone, and honestly, I get to a point where I find repeating the same thing over and over again, which is what you end up doing in a lot of multiplayer games, to be rather tedious.
And yet I still feel like I would enjoy playing something together with a like-minded group. I still feel like it would be nice to have a group of online friends that I can enjoy something alongside. I just don't really know what that game would look like at this point, because I suspect the sort of thing that fulfils what I'm looking for — something reasonably social, not based on bullying, and which doesn't demand you make that game your entire personality if you want to have a good time with it — doesn't really exist.
Oh well. It's not as if I'm short of single-player things to enjoy. It'd just be nice to find something I enjoy that would help me make some friends — or indeed be able to have fun with my few remaining existing friends.
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