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Sure, it will be disappointing if the game isn’t any good. I hate when games disappoint me<\/a>. But this isn’t just about whether Cyberpunk 2077 is any good. This is about whether or not the concept of a big-budget, content-rich, story-focused single-player game is still viable.<\/p>\n I can only speak for myself, of course. But informally I gather a lot of other folks – mostly old-timer Gen-X people like me – are seeing this game as a chance to make A STATEMENT about what the audience wants and is willing to pay for.\u00a0 If this game makes a billion dollars and sweeps the 2021 awards, maybe it will send a strong signal to the publishers that they’ve been neglecting a non-trivial number of consumers.<\/p>\n This has been a long time in coming. The publishers have been promising, pushing, and praying for an all-multiplayer world since 2006<\/a>Actually longer than that, but I think the mid-aughts is when things began to move in that direction.<\/span>. Like I said back in that 2006 post: I think this is something that publishers want more than the players, but I’ll admit that multiplayer has encroached on the single-player market in ways I didn’t think were possible back then.<\/p>\n When I wrote that 2006 article, there was a fairly clear line between single-player and multi-player. Deus Ex<\/i> was an inescapably immersive single-player experience, and World of Warcraft<\/i> was a multi-player one. I thought the publishers were proposing to give us more of the latter and less of the former. What I didn’t foresee is that the publishers would try to erase the line between the two.<\/p>\n Now we’ve had over a decade of games where multiplayer bullshit was wedged into our single-player games. At launch Mass Effect 3 required you to play online to maximize your options in the single-player campaign. The KOTOR series somehow became an MMO while retaining the conceit of a “main character”. Games added built-in streaming, leaderboards, drop-in co-op, social media connectivity, disconnected online shooter modes, in-game notifications about what achievements your friends have acquired, and central servers pushing in-game events. And that’s not even mentioning the ongoing nightmare of LIIVE SERVICE titles turning our games into second jobs<\/a> and slot machines<\/a> that attack the core appeal of playing a game<\/a>. The push for a more “connected” experience has been a horrendous disaster for those of us who use games to get away from all of the jabbering social interactions of the real world.<\/p>\n But hey, if that’s what the market wants, then who am I to complain? The publishers are making lots of money, so my bellyaching doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n Right?<\/p>\n So it’s 2006 and Walter Disney<\/a> is somehow still alive and running his massive entertainment empire, despite being 105 years old. He’s looking for a way to increase profits in his park, when he hears how much the Adult Entertainment industry makes every year. So he decides to branch out. His imagineers<\/a> devise a new character: Princess Tiddy. She’s a buxom young maiden drawn in the style of a Disney Princess. Tiddy gets her own Gentleman’s Club in Disney World, right on Main Street leading up to the big castle.<\/p>\n And what do you know? Profits are up! Young men book the place for bachelor parties, and old guys book the place for retirement parties. Single dads with shared custody spend their court-mandated weekend by shoving their kids in the direction of Space Mountain and then ducking in to visit with the princess and her “friends”. You can make a ton of cash selling overpriced drinks and lapdances to horny guys, and these dudes understandably have a lot more disposable income than married men.<\/p>\n While Uncle Walt is busy counting his cash, he doesn’t notice the changes happening inside his park. Drunken young guys stagger out of the club to throw up on rollercoasters and clumsily hit on the young mothers in the park. There are reports of women getting groped while standing in line. The area around the Tiddy Bar takes on a dangerous, lurid feel.<\/p>\n The next year, a lot of families decide to take their vacation somewhere else. But Walt doesn’t notice, because he’s expanding the Tiddy Bar and building a hotel specifically for his new nudie bar patrons. Tiddy gets her own show on the Playboy channel. Disney comes out with Prince Beefcake, who gets his own, smaller club in the shadow of the Tiddy Bar.<\/p>\n When Walt finally gets around to looking at the books, he notices that family attendance is way<\/b> down, but lapdance profits are way up. He concludes that he’s a marketing genius. Obviously family entertainment is in decline, and he was smart to pivot to Tits & Booze just before that happened.<\/p>\n Of course, that’s not what really happened. The reality is that he’s destroying his core business, and there’s no reason he couldn’t be making money from both markets if he’d had the wit to keep them separate. Family Entertainment profits aren’t down because people don’t want it anymore, they’re down because he’s made his product hostile to his original customers!<\/p>\n This is what I think happened to single-player games. They aren’t less popularI’m just accepting the claims of the publishers that single-player really is less popular. They don’t share numbers so we have to take their word for it. For the purposes of this article, let’s just pretend we believe them.<\/span> because everyone wants always-online, they’re less popular because publishers added a bunch of social-medial-shared-experience-always-connected garbage that harmed the product.<\/p>\n I can’t prove any of this, of course. The above analogy is based entirely on my own experience as a video game enthusiast. Things were great in the old days<\/a>, but as the world of connected gaming encroached on single-player experiences, my enjoyment of the product has gone down.<\/p>\n I’ll admit it’s inaccurate to blame all<\/b> of gaming’s woes on multiplayer. Publishers want their games to capture the prestige of Hollywood, but at the same time they have no idea how to appraise stories or acquire writing talent. So we end up with enormously expensive cutscenes telling childish<\/a>, sanctimonious<\/a>, tedious<\/a>, incoherent<\/a>, and idiotic<\/a> stories. I don’t pretend that the original Deus Ex<\/i> was a brilliant story, but as a crazy B-movie cyberpunk spy thriller it was more cohesive than either of the recent entries in the series, which aspired to be profound and came off as muddled and sophomoric<\/a>. The sardonic and brooding Garret of the original Thief<\/a> wasn’t the most ambitious character ever devised, but he was a thousand times more likeable and interesting than the obnoxious and repulsive Aiden Pearce<\/a>, despite Aiden embodying the same archetype and having an order of magnitude more budget behind himOkay, that’s a guess. I don’t have hard numbers for the budget of either game. But it’s a very safe guess.<\/span>. This trend of “more story, worse story” sucks, but we can’t blame it on the general push for Multiplayer Everything.<\/p>\n But while we can’t blame everything on the push for more “connected experiences”, I think we can blame it for a lot of the most destructive trends. To me it feels like the end goal is to tie every game to a server. Once that happens, you’ll have to buy the sequel at launch not because the new game is better, but because the old game vanished from existence when they took the servers offline.<\/p>\n If we follow the trend line of the last few years, then it seems like all hope is lost. Sooner or later this garbage will come to your preferred genre. At that point you’ll have three choices:<\/p>\n But maybe that’s not where we’re headed. Yes, loot box live service trash was pretty hot for a couple of years, but maybe that wasn’t the market accepting the new norm. Maybe it just took consumers a couple of years to realize that the Magic Kingdom had been turned into Vegas. The twin failures of Anthem and Marvel’s Avengers<\/a> are perhaps enough to get the attention of the big publishers and get them to question their assumptions. The bigger the losses, the more clear the signal.<\/p>\n (Note to fans who were looking forward to these games: I’m not glad the games were bad, and I’m not happy to see you disappointed. I’m just happy that the games lost money as a result<\/b> of being bad.)<\/p>\n Which brings me back to Cyberpunk 2077. This game is riding such a massive wave of hype that it’s hard to not get my hopes up. If this thing could be enough of an industry-shaking blockbuster, then maybe the publishers will take notice. They love to chase whatever made money the previous year, so it would be great if the Next Big Trend was a shift back towards single-player experiences.<\/p>\n Then again, that’s a lot to ask of one title. And the publishers could just as easily learn the wrong lessons. Maybe they’ll assume the game was a hit because “the cyberpunk genre was big that year”. Maybe they’ll assume the good sales were the result of the nudity and violence. Maybe they’ll assume the success was due to the celebrity stunt-casting of Keanu Reeves<\/a>. Even if this game knocks it out of the park, that’s not a guarantee that Bobby Kotick<\/a> and Andrew Wilson<\/a> will learn the right lessons. And on top of all that, there’s still a chance the game won’t be particularly good or successfulI’m sure sales will be great. But this game was in development for a long time, so it needs to sell like CRAZY to make enough money to get the other publishers excited.<\/span>.<\/p>\n Still, it would be wonderfully ironic if the game about a fantastical corporate dystopia acted as a pushback against our mundane corporate dystopia.<\/p>\n I realize this entire post is basically a great big 2,000 word version of Old Man Yells at Cloud<\/a>. I can’t help it. This hobby is usually going out of its way to annoy me, and for one brief moment it feels like the good old days. I can buy a single-player game and know I’m getting the full experience without worrying I might be missing out<\/a> if I don’t get the Day 1 DLC. I don’t have to log in to ask if I can play. I don’t need to read an online guide to figure out which overpriced edition of the game has the features I want<\/a>. I know ahead of time the developers didn’t make the game extra-grindy so they could sell me a solution to the problem they created<\/a>. No immersion-breaking prompts to hot-join random strangers<\/a>. No community events. No lootbox bullshit. No in-game advertisements<\/a>. No prompts to connect on social media. No outrageous platform-specific content locks<\/a>. No clumsy artificial incentives<\/a> pushing single-player types to engage with the multiplayer modes.<\/p>\n Yes, maybe it’s silly that I wrote this post. But it’s even more silly that this topic is up for discussion at all. Why does this need to be such a big deal? This is exactly what millions of fans ask for every year, and it’s what TakeTwo, Electronic Arts, Activision, and Ubisoft refuse to give us, over and over again. The crap I listed in the previous paragraph isn’t some insurmountable task. It’s just a lack of unwanted features<\/strong>. I love that I’m getting my no-bullshit cyberpunk RPG shooter this year, but I bet millions of other people would enjoy a no-bullshit version of Assassin’s Creed, Doom, a Marvel Superhero game, a stealth shooter, and a dozen other things.<\/p>\n If this is all we get, then I really hope it’s big enough to make the publishers pay attention to us again. And even if we don’t get that, it would be really nice if the Cyberpunk sales numbers could serve as a “fuck you” to the publishers that polluted this hobby with their crass bullshit.<\/p>\n Sorry for being so cranky. I think I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow when the game launches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s finally happening. Cyberpunk 2077 will release tomorrow. Well, technically it comes out at midnight on Thursday, but due to time zone differences that means I’ll get access to it Wednesday evening. I have the game preloaded.\u00a0 Now we’re just waiting for someone at CDPR to throw the switch. Obviously the hype for this game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51342"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51369,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51342\/revisions\/51369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/div>An Analogy<\/h3>\n
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<\/div>But What Do I Know?<\/h3>\n
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But!<\/h3>\n
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