[knome]

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.

[tragic]

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?

[glogla]

You should try Spec Ops: the Line then. It sounds like it would be game exactly for you.

[cwyers]

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?