So what? there were not the only games out there. I enjoyed playing Civilization, Colonization, Dune, Half Life, Ultima for hours and hours without having the need to play with anyone. Human opponents are not necessary to have great games.
I'll agree you do not have to have humans to make an interesting play experience. However, the addition of human opponents creates almost infinite replayability. I probably had two, maybe three runthroughs of Half Life, with as many as two hundred hours of gameplay. It was an excellent game, superior to any other FPS I had played upto that point, and I enjoyed it greatly. However, I am not sure I would even want to calculate the amount of time I spent in the Counterstrike mod during the same period even if I could. Thousands of servers, millions of unique opponents? It was a daily ritual of my early twenties, often a few hours a night to relax after work.
Yeah, both were great games. But one was a great game that never seemed to end.
I kind of feel the opposite. Yes, with CS there are thousands of people to play against and so on, but how different are the bouts from one another really?
I much prefer linear, narrative-driven single-player games, if they're done well - on the ninth or tenth play through of HL1, Deus Ex, Vampire: Bloodlines or whatever, I still feel like I'm noticing new details; the world feels more 'alive' to me without thousands of other normal human beings getting in the way and ruining the suspension of disbelief. It's like going back to a great film or novel.
It's a matter of taste, of course, but I in no way feel MMO games and such are more 'advanced', as some people in this thread seem to think. There's a particularly grouchy film critic over here who likes to ask, "would Citizen Kane be better in 3D?" Likewise: would FF7 be better with a million 14 year olds running around telling people they got pwned?
I agree with you about preferring immersive single-player to multiplayer a lot of the time. But "would Citizen Kane be better in 3D?" is such a weird question -- it's hard to recognize it as such now, as much of what it does is now commonplace, but it's such a pioneering film in how it uses technology, and there's a lot of special effects in it. Who's to say Orson Welles WOULDN'T have found a use for 3D if it had been available to him?
