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[Urazz]

I generally, don't like multiplayer in single player games, I felt the ME3 multiplayer was a bad idea and felt forced by EA even if it was decent.

My friends and I were discussing on our lunch break at work about how some games end up being bad investments because too much money was spent on them that it pretty much made it so a game had to sell a lot more copies than it was capable of selling.  This got me thinking about EA and their idea of forcing Bioware and other companies under their umbrella to put multiplayer in their games even if they are primarily single player games.

Sure they may put the multiplayer aspect of a game under a different company or give the company making the game more time and money to finish the game but doesn't this also come at a price?  Doesn't this increase the total amount of money a company like EA invests in a game and raise the amount of copies a game needs for it to be successful enough for them to want a sequel to be made?

I think it does and it gets me thinking that is one of the main reasons why EA has been having issues lately.  They have been forcing multiplayer on games that it just doesn't work for in hopes of drawing players that focus on multiplayer games.  How many people have gotten ME3 for it's multiplayer or played it solely for the multiplayer?  Not many to my knowledge and while ME3 was successful as a game, it would've been even more of a success for EA I think if it didn't have that money invested on a multiplayer aspect.

[Allan Schumacher]

Star fury wrote...

someguy1231 wrote...

Star fury wrote...

someguy1231 wrote...

The whole "resources" argument against MP is stupid for two reasons:

1) It falsely assumes game development is a zero-sum game. When a game gets multiplayer, it gets additional resources allocated toward that which the game otherwise wouldn't have.

Source? And is it true with ME3 MP?

It's Game Design 101. Any game studio that tells its developers to make a feature as large as multiplayer without giving them the resources they'd need is a studio too dumb to survive.

As for ME3's MP, it was developed by Bioware's Montreal studio, while ME3's SP was done by their Edmonton studio.

Ah, so no source at all. M'kay.

I have also stated it in the past on these forums.

[Allan Schumacher]

But is it really true? Would we have ended up with no N7 missions, or would the people doing multiplayer have spent their time making something other than horde-mode arenas that could be populated with the barest of story for reuse in the single-player campaign?

Not to mention the probable technical mandates that came from incorporating multiplayer into the engine. Or that unfortunate war assets system. Or the multitude of horribly balanced weapons. Or the cookie-cutter enemy faction composition. Etc.

Unfortunately it's hard to say one way or another.

There's no guarantees that the people would have still been working on Mass Effect. Many people were explicitly hired on, and they may simply have just not been hired on.

Yes, there's likely some spill over (though it works both ways... people working on multiplayer can still help out the single player experience as well) in terms of decisions being made to accommodate both, but the fact is that a feature like MP, especially since it has its own revenue strategy that supplements the main game, can justify additional expenditure.

I mean, remember when there were the bigger EA layoffs, and there were some tweets from BioWare staffers and other articles about how BioWare was experiencing some layoffs as well? The reason for that is because of the extension. Many contract staffers were just let go, as well as some full time permanent employees? Why? Because while we have a time extension, and we did get additional funding, the funding model didn't call for the specific manpower capacity (which was ramping up due to the game's release date being less than a year away) to be maintained for an additional year. As a result, while I think the news and decision is fantastic for the project, it meant some people lost their jobs as a result.

And even if we just accept that all those people would have been fired
or reassigned if there was no multiplayer component, it doesn't seem
credible to suggest that priorities would have remained the same for the
project (given a lot of the design—weapons, powers, enemies, etc.—seem
to indicate heavy coordination and cooperation between the two teams).

This is simply a logical construct, which may or may not be true, unfortunately.  Although at least you're willing to acknowledge that the people working on multiplayer would still be contributing to the SP game, which undermines the perspective that Multiplayer exclusively sucks resources out of the game.

Why doesn't it seem credible to suggest that the priorities for things like weapons, powers, and so forth, remain the same?  I actually don't know the answer to that question, but is it believed to be true simply because it supports your concerns?  Is it possible that the priorities of the single player game were what led to the multiplayer experience?  That is, that the multiplayer team looked at what the single player game had, and worked with those constraints?  Or is that just not even remotely possible?

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 06 septembre 2013 - 08:35 .