A bit of a Gripe.

As many of you know, I am an achievement whore.  I’ve been closing in on the 120k mark on my gamer score (just 95pts away at this point).   The game that I chose to put me over the 120k line is Saints Row the Third.   My wife and I have really been enjoying it, so we decided to order the first 2 games in the series since we never played them.  As I looked over the achievements for the first 2 I noticed a trend, the achievements were heavily focused on online play.   Now as many of you also know, I’m not a fan of most multiplayer.  I do enjoy the Call of Duty and Halo, multiplayer until I get bored with them (which normally takes about 2 weeks).  

I have more fun with COD because when I do play multiplayer I am not chasing achievements, I play the game for the game, when I play Halo, I do not enjoy myself because I spend the entire game trying to get a Killenmanjaro, or trying to line up 3 players to take them out with the Spartan laser.   I may enjoy playing, but I lose track of why I am playing the multiplayer in the first place.  But to see a game like Saint’s Row 2 where 500 of the achievement points are dedicated to a dead multiplayer, it makes me mad, it means I will only play half the game, and leave it unfinished.   

It makes me feel that they added the multiplayer to the game because the investors see COD and HALO, and decide they MUST have multiplayer because it will sell the game.  So the developers quickly tack on a multiplayer feature, but knowing that no one will play it because people are buying their game for the single player experience, they add a TON of very hard to get achievements to the multiplayer in an attempt to inflate their numbers at release to call the addition a “success” because people are grinding for the achievements, and NOT because they actually want to play the game.

COD has it right, don’t put out multiplayer achievements unless you can earn them offline as well, and let your multiplayer attract people because it is good and not because you have to bribe them to play.

I know there will be plenty of people who disagree with me, and feel free to, I just want to throw the idea out there in hope that there will be developers out there who remember that not all of us want our games to be online timmy frag fests, the single player campaign still needs lovin’.  Take a page out of Bethesda’s book, and don’t add multiplayer where it doesn’t belong….that’s not to say I don’t love co op, heck, if Bethesda ever releases a co-op Elder Scrolls game, I think my wife and I will need to set up a pair of IV drips and invest in adult diapers because our asses would never leave the couch.

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