Everybody is on the internet these days. Unless a friend printed this article off and mailed it to you, you're on the internet right now. Between your phone, your work, your car, maybe even your fridge, your central heating, and your clocks, you're always kind of on the internet. Because of this, it has become the norm for video games to assume we will be constantly online when we play them, even forcing it where it has no real purpose. Please, just let me play offline.
I wrote about this phenomenon recently, after Redfall announced it was lookiꦫng into ways to walk back its always-online deman🌄ds. Redfall has an online co-op functionality, but it's mostly a game where you take one character through a self-contained story. The most similar touchstone might be 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Borderlands, since t🐎hat has four-player couch co-op but however you play it is always a first person shooter𒀰 where you work towards a specific endpoint while shooting enemies and picking up loot.
With a game like Redfall, going online should enhance the experience, but it shouldn't be a requirement. Consider 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring - it has online play, allowing for invaders and assistance and so on, but you can turn this off and just play on your own. Unfortunately, not all games allow this. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice L♏eague will 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:be always online, and as Features Editor Andrew King recalls not so fondly, Hitman 2's offline experience was so diluted you couldn't even save if you weren't connected to the internet. Anthem was a self-contained story wrapped 🅰around a live-service package, but would constantly push you out of the single-player mode to grind online to justify stitching the mode🌳s together prematurely rather than having story and online exist as two separate entities.
Always-on DRM is a major reason for games requiring an internet connection, but it's more of a nuisance than anything else. DRM exists to prevent copyright infringement, but has long proven itself ineffective at this while hampering the player experience for thousands, if not millions. If your own internet dies, DRM means you’ll be unable to play the game at all. On the flip side, if the studios servers go down (either for maintenance, as the result of an IT error, or an eventual permanent shutdown), you’ll also be locked out with nothing to do but sit and wait. These updates can be annoying in online games, but at least they’re understandable. With single-player games, especially when hackers and pirates still manage to find a way around DRM restrictions, it feels as if they only exist to inconvenience you.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Activision has a particularly peculiar attitude to always-online. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, a single-player game with only a handful of online game modes, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Bandicoot 4, an entirely single-player game, are both always-online on PC while the console versions are not. This means console players are fr🌟ee to play however they wish, while PC players can be locked out at a moment’s notice, potentially with no way to fix the issue. Long term, they can lose access to the game, even the single-player poꦡrtions, forever. Console players who bought the disc or even downloaded the game will still have it as long as they have a console that can run it.
There are some games which are made to be online experiences specifically, and while that's usually bad news down the line when it comes to preservation, it's far less frustrating for Online Shooter Arena 3 to be always-online than Single-Player Adventure Game. Strangely, the game which has given me the most hope is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:MultiVersus. It's wildly anti-consumer that MultiVe꧟rsus is pulling the beta from stores and turning the servers off, acting as if this was always the plan when in reality it is scrambling to cut its losses after players already paid good money into its ecosystem, and wants the glory of a full launch while harming its most loyal fans. However, the game will remain available for offline play, and that's something. Not much, but it's something.
I truly hate what MultiVersus is doing. I supported the game at launch, our site has covered the game extensively, I know lots of people have poured money into Founder's Packs, and while IP soup isn't my favourite genre of media, I liked the characters in MultiVersus and was intrigued to see where it would go next. However, there is one thing I must praise MultiVersus for - even when it goes offline, you can still play it. Sure, it will be a hollow shell of a game already lacking in features, but if you want to beat up Bugs Bunny as Harley Quinn, you still can. You won't be able to match with your friends online or work your way through battle passes, but the game will still exist.
Elden Ring and other games like it have it figured out. If it's a single-player game where online play can add some depth or improve the experience, have online be optional. For every game like that, whether it’s player invasion or co-op play, always-online is unnecessary, can lock players with poor connections out of what is meant to be a single-player experience, and is often detrimental to the overall experience as internet outages can derail gameplay. The world is constantly online, but video games don't need to be. Just let me play offline.