According to DualShockers, who translated a piece by Taiwanese media from a Taipei Game Show, inFamouns Second Son will not feature multiplayer in a traditional sense which is music to my ears. Too often do we get tacked on multiplayer modes in games that really don’t add much if anything to the overall experience – Tomb Raider and BioShock 2 come to mind here.
If a developer like Sucker Punch takes 100 percent of its resources to put into the single player experience, we know the game is most likely the best it can be. Even if a studio, responsible for the single player campaign, has to dedicate resources to oversea the outsourcing of the multiplayer, development resources get lost.
Don’t get me wrong, I like or even love multiplayer modes in shooters and even games like The Last of Us but it is not something a traditional narrative based game needs to have and business people at these publishers and studios should stop pushing coop or multiplayer in games that don’t need it.
Too often do we read postmortem pieces about games where studio members talk about squandered development time because a business decision was made since ‘coop was the new cool thing‘ or ‘we must have multiplayer to sell millions‘. The end result is often the same, the game quality suffers, features get cut or the game isn’t quite finished which ultimately hurts the game.
One could argue we didn’t even need multiplayer in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V since the game sold millions of copies without the mode even being live. And when GTA Online did launch it was plagued by server and stability issues.
In the end I am happy to hear that Sucker Punch and Sony decided to exclude multiplayer and go all out on inFamous Second Son’s single player campaign which is where the franchise has carved out its place and truly shines.
Now to play devil’s advocate, if inFamous – much like The Last of Us – were to add meaningful multiplayer modes, I would certainly try and play it but to be on the safe side, I much rather see the game come to light without any potential setbacks because of tacked on modes that are just not necessary.
