How Single Player Games Are Essential to Modern Video Games

Justin White

CART-101-07

Lisa Hayes-Minney

November 11, 2018

How Single Player Games are Essential to Modern Video Games

        Single player games or slowly dying form of video games. That's why were dominated by Thirteen-year old’s dancing to their favorite Battle Royale game in the gaming market, and that's an issue.

        These massive, multiplayer-only, “AAA” titles are weeding out games with extreme time, and care poured into a world with a rich story, in place for as much “quantity-over-quality” as developers can fit. This can lead to issues such as developers shipping unfinished games , broken games, games with more than half of the content blocked by a DLC (Downloadable Content) paywall. This also arises the issue of players gaining an unfair advantage with special equipment, or items bought with real money in game, as opposed to people play the game on an equal, or more frequent basis, that do not spend money on what are now commonly referred to as “Microtransactions”.

1. Current Issues:

1. Only a total of 4 solo-centered “AAA” games were released within the span of 2017, to 2018. Those being: Super Mario Odyssey, the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, and a remake of God of War for the PlayStation 4.

1. Video game production company Activision, most commonly known for producing the “Call of Duty” franchise of first person shooter games, was met with harsh criticism when they revealed the executive order to remove a traditional single player campaign, in place of a 100 player free-for-all Battle Royale game mode similar to Epic Games’ “Fortnite” in their newly released 2018 installment of: “Call of Duty: Black Ops 4”.

1. Censorship, or banning of video games due to content:

1. As stated before, production company Activision, and development team Treyarch, faced hard criticism at the unveil of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. One such complaint, was that in the October issue of Polygon’s (a game review media source) “Games This Month” Article, a reviewer stated that Activision's latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise, was quote: “Too gory for today’s leading audience.”. Referring to Not any cinematic cutscenes in the game. Due to the lack of a cinematic story mode. But instead refers to when a character is blown up by an explosive in the game, resulting in a brief explosion of blood and body parts.
2. Video game developer Valve’s hit zombie horde survival game “Left 4 Dead 2” was released in 2011 almost internationally. However, Australia has been notorious in the past banning international releases of games due to the games breaking Australia’s very strict censorship laws on media and video games. Even though no gore is present in the game, besides whenever the player kills the only enemy in the game. Zombies.

However, with the ever-growing evolution of today's modern Internet, a large sum of independent video game developers have gotten the chance to share the projects they have made with everybody around the world. Most independent developers do not charge for sharing or playing their games. Indie game developers have become more successful in recent years of producing higher quality, Unrestricted video games to share on the Internet. The most notable examples would be the advent of Scott Cawthon’s “Five Nights at Freddie’s” line of horror games in 2014, or Toby Fox’s smash hit “Undertale” in 2015, which has just received a second installment, also provided for free to anyone with access to the Internet. Most independent game developers create these types of games out of their own free will, passion for the art a video games, the dedication to their fans. All I will ask of you, is to download, and support independent game developers, in order to keep the art of creating video games with no creative censorship alive.