Techpedition

With the announcement of a new Assassin’s Creed episode today, it was good to know that it will be out in 2010 and it will be a stand alone product.  It however, was extremely shocking to hear that it will have multiplayer.  I am calling it right now.  Stop It!  Stop adding multiplayer to games that don’t need it.  First Uncharted, then Bioshock and now Assassin’s Creed?  It looks like we are 3 for 3 on adding useless extra modes to spectacular single player experiences.

What’s next, a multiplayer God of War or maybe a team death match in Half Life?  I don’t think the game mechanics of Braid have been exploited in a multiplayer fashion yet, maybe that would work.  Hurry Sony, it’s not too late to put multiplayer in The Last Guardian!

I don’t care what Ubisoft does with the multiplayer; I don’t want to play a multiplayer Assassin’s Creed!  Are they scared that they aren’t going to sell enough copies?  Wrong, they just announced that the second game has sold 6 million copies worldwide with another 3 million projected this quarter.  I don’t mean to sound like a whiny gamer but I honestly think that it has gone too far.

Multiplayer, at least in most cases, can only be enjoyed by people that sink 100s of hours in to a game and learn all of its quirks.  There are only so many gamers who like that kind of gameplay and by adding more and more games to choose from only two things can happen.  1. Players will abandon the multiplayer modes in most games and flock to the popular one (this renders all of the hard work done by the developers useless)  2. The multiplayer scene in all games will be stretched so thin that each game will only have a handful of decent players.

I say if you are going to make a multiplayer game go all out like MAG.  The days of tacked on deathmatch modes is over, both single player fans and multiplayer deserve better.

In other news, I highly recommend Assassin’s Creed 2.  It’s one of the most fulfilling gaming experiences in years and the ending is magnificent.