Where Did Everybody Go?

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A celebrated game of yesteryear is getting a new, remastered release (more on that here) with a sizeable caveat: it is now exclusively single-player. If the game was already single-player only, that’s not really a caveat, but otherwise, it suggests that the multiplayer modes in the original have been excised for one reason or another. This has been happening for a while, and there’s no reason to believe it’s going to stop any time soon.

For a current example, look to Konami’s upcoming Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2. To their credit, the online multiplayer from Peace Walker is included, likely as a holdover from Bluepoint’s prior Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, but the online companion to Metal Gear Solid 4 is omitted. The Bluepoint collections also did not include the online multiplayer mode from Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, despite the version of Snake Eater included being based on the Subsistence version. One can split hair about whether these were multiplayer modes or separate games included in a bundle, but the fact remains that these experiences have not been preserved.

And that’s just the latest casualty. One can find this happening in all sorts of games, like Mass Effect 3, Bioshock 2, Red Dead Redemption, or the Crysis trilogy. Naughty Dog has done this no less than four times. The externally-developed Nathan Drake Collection did not include the online multiplayer from Among Thieves and Drake’s Deception. The internally-developed The Last of Us Remastered did preserve the Factions multiplayer mode, but the later The Last of Us Part I remake did not, nor did the much more straightforward remaster Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves include online multiplayer (both did curiously include multiplayer developers in the credits, however). These are big examples, and there are surely other big examples out there, along with lots of smaller ones. You get the picture.

So, why not include multiplayer? One obvious answer is that having online multiplayer brings additional costs with it. Servers cost money, exploits must be patched, player activity must be moderated, and so forth. That’s without getting into the costs of actually remastering these multiplayer modes. The netcodes of years past are often not enough to pass muster in the present, and we’ve seen how updating a game to a new netcode can introduce unexpected behaviour. So there is an element of “if it can’t be done well, don’t do it.” Another explanation, this time a bit more cynical, is that the publishers don’t want the multiplayer in their new games to be outdone by their old games. I am a bit skeptical of this argument, if only because of how many older games still have active online multiplayer. No matter how much people complain about the latest Call of Duty, I don’t think there’s any evidence that players are fleeing in droves to whichever Call of Duty they think was the last good one. And for many of the examples listed above, the publishers don’t even have any new multiplayer games that the old ones could compete against.

There’s one more explanation: some of these multiplayer modes, maybe even most of them, simply weren’t very good. When online multiplayer became popular, more and more games started to have multiplayer modes tacked on, often at the publisher’s insistence, sometimes even developed partly or wholly by another studio (see Spec-Ops: The Line). This was often a waste of time and resources, as these modes failed to attract new players and to capture the attention of existing players. If the multiplayer wasn’t good and wasn’t part of the developers’ original vision, maybe that justifies excluding it. Or maybe it doesn’t. How many parts of the single-player weren’t what the developers wanted either? Should we cut those parts as well? Or should we do our best to preserve the game as it was, warts and all?

From this perspective, we can start to see some remasters as an effort to rewrite the narrative. Some of the games I’ve mentioned had well-liked multiplayer modes, but others had bad ones that stunk of publisher interference. Now, those games are being remastered and released without multiplayer, as if those modes never existed. They’re being molded into a shape that fits the game industry of today. I alluded to this above, but a lot of newer games that likely would have had multiplayer modes in the past simply do not have them. Naughty Dog released The Last of Us Part II without multiplayer and then canceled their plans for a standalone multiplayer The Last of Us game. Bioware made an attempt to enter the live service space with Anthem, which turned out poorly for them, and plans for the next Dragon Age game to be multiplayer were abandoned. It’s not that multiplayer games stopped being popular. Far from it. It’s more the opposite: a smaller number of multiplayer games have become super popular. These games are increasingly online only live service games. A multiplayer mode attached to a single-player game can rarely compete with that, and as we’ve seen, making your own live service game often ends in disaster. Games have become more specialized: there are single-player games and there are multiplayer games. We’re reshaping the games of the past to fit into one of those categories.

As described previously, it’s a whole lot easier to preserve an offline game than an online one. If half of a game is offline, that will be easier to preserve. So what happens when the whole game is online? We’ve seen a number of games that were meant to be hits meet untimely ends (Concord, Highguard, etc). But even the successful ones run into trouble. Overwatch, 2016’s Game of the Year winner, is no longer playable, despite massive popularity (you can play Overwatch, but that’s actually a rebranded Overwatch 2, which is not Overwatch). Online multiplayer games are inherently volatile, and yet they mean a lot to many people. A man once said “no one buys a game specifically for multiplayer options” but frankly, he was wrong, and however you feel about that, it’s something we need to take seriously. It’s for the best that developers aren’t tacking on bad multiplayer modes like they did in days of yore, but just like any bygone trend, it’s a part of our history.