For those of you that have followed my writing on this site, you will be aware that my content is few and far between. This is mostly because I’m lazy but sometimes I do actually have a legitimate excuse for being absent. I recently moved house and in that move, there was a period of 5 weeks where I didn’t have Internet. This was the first time since I was playing on Xbox 360, years ago, that this had happened. My current-gen console gaming had all been done online with friends or 12 year-old, foul-mouthed kids. Sure, there were times where I played alone but those were darker times and I’d rather not discuss them. This leads me into the point of this article: gaming offline. Have we become too used to playing online that we’ve lost the real magic of gaming? I mean, when I was younger there was no such thing as the Internet and even when there was, you sure as shit didn’t have it at home. We all have those special memories of playing single player games like Donkey Kong 64 and The Legend of Big Carl Stoddard (wait, Zelda is a girl?). There was no online feature and no one cared. Now, if a game is released without online functionality, you’ve basically wiped out half of your audience.
During my time without Internet I discovered a lot about the type of gamer I have become. I did sweet FA gaming because I didn’t have a party chat to banter about what was going on in the game. I attempted a number of games but ultimately, not one of them satisfied me the way games used to. Perhaps it was the games I was playing or perhaps I’m now a multiplayer gamer. I purchased The Witcher III months ago and it sits with about 2 hours of gameplay invested. I want to go back to it but I just never do.
During this dark time, I discovered things about my gaming that I wasn’t aware of previously and it upset me. It wasn’t until I was forced to game alone that I realised that I had been gaming online almost exclusively. The Internet is a fantastic tool, obviously, but the introduction of The Internet and online gaming has really changed
tchanged the way we perceive a game. Our idea of a “proper” game is one that has a large multiplayer element, one that still has a campaign but it takes a back seat. In Call Of Duty for example, most people buy it to play online. Do a lot of people still play the campaign? They probably do but the popularity of the game never takes a hit if the single player element is poor. The focus has shifted in recent years from creating a game primarily around single player, then moving on to the multiplayer as a bit of a bonus, to focusing solely on multiplayer with a token campaign to keep people happy.
Let’s take a look at ‘The Order: 1886’ as an example of what I am talking about. The Order received less than glowing reviews and has a metascore of just 63. For a game that was designed to look, sound and feel extraordinarily better than anything else on current-gen consoles, 63 seems ridiculous. If you go back a few months, resident gamer Zach reviewed The Order and gave it a score of 8.8/10. Zach is the type of gamer that looks first at how the single player element can satisfy him then looks at all the other things. He takes time to appreciate a game based on its merits rather than what mainstream gaming has convinced us is important. As a community of gamers we’ve gone away from appreciating a game for its quality and we’ve latched on to the idea that a game must be a mash of fast-paced action and explosions. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a gamer that fits that description more than I do and that makes me ashamed of how I’ve been influenced over the last few years. I have no doubt that had The Order: 1886 been released a generation ago it would have been touted as the best game ever created. We look too quickly for quantity without stopping to look for a game’s quality.
So the point? Take some time to go back into your childhood and appreciate a game for what it is. Look not for quantity but instead try and find enjoyment in the moment of beauty that is a game. As well, make sure you don’t forget how to game alone because you’ve then lost most of what makes gaming special. Take the time out to play the campaign, switch off the net and get stuck into a single player RPG. If it’s a choice you may find it’s much easier to do than if you’re forced like I was.
