Remember back in the Xbox 360/PS3 era when every game had a multiplayer component? Back in those days, the concept of a multiplayer-only game was still pretty fresh. Why would anyone pay for only half a game?

It seems like such a long time ago now, but back then, most single-player games launched alongside multiplayer modes that used the game’s central mechanics in some way or another to create unique multiplayer experiences. If I’m being honest, most multiplayer modes weren’t particularly good, but they were frequently interesting, at the very least.

In today’s gaming landscape, games are usually released as one or the other: single player or multiplayer. I understand why that is and that we’re probably better off for it, but I miss the gimmicky multiplayer modes of games past.

A Different Games Industry

I replayed Dead Space 2 this week after getting upset thinking about EA’s treatment of the Dead Space remake, and when I started it up, I was left gawking at the game’s menu for a minute. ‘Oh, yeah, this thing had a multiplayer mode,’ I said to myself, remembering that you could play as the toddler necromorphs and get gunned down by someone you’d never met a hundred times in a row.

It was a different time.

After that realization, I started pulling every Xbox 360 game off the shelf that I could remember having a multiplayer mode. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Mass Effect 3, Resident Evil 6, Bioshock 2 — like I said, basically every triple-A title had one — and most of them were pretty cool. I’m not going to say they were all ‘good,’ but they were cool. Interesting. Unique.

Most of these multiplayer modes weren’t fully fleshed-out multiplayer experiences in the way we know them today. Dead Space 2’s multiplayer mode wasn’t Fortnite. It distatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t offer thousands of hours of replayability or frequent content updates, but it did add something to the experience of playing Dead Space 2 and allowed the mechanics of the game to be used in a new way.

A lot of these multiplayer modes grew small, devoted fanbases that developed into larger communities built around seemingly forgotten game modes. For example, The Last of Us: Factions was a popular multiplayer mode that grew a community so large that Naughty Dog worked on a stand-alone Factions follow-up to The Last of Us Part 2 for more than five years before canceling it.

I know Factions is a touchy subject, sorry for bringing it up.

Where Are They Now?

It’s a shame that we don’t see these kinds of tacked-on multiplayer modes anymore because they always felt like a way for a studio to have some fun with the mechanics that they were working with. In rare cases, studios were able to fill in even more of a game’s narrative using a multiplayer mode like with Bioshock 2: Fall of Rapture.

In an age where games get remastered for modern consoles all the time, unfortunately, most multiplayer modes don’t get revived when a game gets a re-release. While I feel for the communities of gamers who loved the multiplayer modes of old, I do understand why those modes are dropped for remasters. Supporting a multiplayer game takes a lot of work and costs a lot of money to keep servers online and pay additional development costs for balance changes and tweaking. Given the state of the industry when it comes to budgets, I don’t blame a studio like BioWare for omitting the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster.

I think it’s unlikely that multiplayer modes will ever come back with the prevalence they had back in the mid to late 2000s. The industry has moved on to a different model and it’s a model that only has room for single-player games or multiplayer games. I just wish there was still a little bit of room, at the very least, for game modes where I can play as a zombie toddler whose favorite food is space engineers.

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Mass Effect 3

Action Adventure Systems Released March 6, 2012 ESRB M for Mature: Blood, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence Developer(s) BioWare Publisher(s) Electronic Arts Engine Unreal Engine 3
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