This week Respawn announced they have decided to drop the single player campaign in their upcoming FPS Titanfall. Sadly, with this announcement, they have officially lost me. Vince Zampella, co-founder of Respawn, explained their focus on the multiplayer aspect.
“We make these single-player missions that take up all the focus of the studio, that take a huge team six months to make, and players run through it in 8 minutes… and how many people finish the single-player game? It’s a small percentage. It’s like, everyone plays through the first level, but 5 percent of people finish the game. Really, you split the team. They’re two different games. They’re balanced differently, they’re scoped differently. But people spend hundreds of hours in the multiplayer experience versus ‘as little time as possible rushing to the end’ [in single-player]. So why do all the resources go there? To us it made sense to put it here. Now everybody sees all those resources, and multiplayer is better. For us it made sense.”
I can totally understand where they are coming from, and I am a huge fan of PVP. That being said, I do not invest my money in games so I can PVP, I invest my money in games to experience the wonderful engaging stories. I also totally disagree with the above quote. I have played dozens of MMOs and been a part of just as many guilds and, out of the thousands of people I have met online, every single one of them plays and finishes the story missions. So the idea of dropping a single player campaign, just because a few people don’t finish the story, seems crazy to me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am sure Titanfall will be a good game (there are many games that have been successful with the PVP only thing), but I do not plan to spend any money on a game with no single player campaign. I think back to all those times at 4 in the morning when everyone has went offline and gone to bed, and I am still up playing solo missions. I don’t plan on ruling Titanfall out completely, they might realize their mistake and put the single player back in, but unless they change this I have no plans on picking it up. Titanfall is still set for a Spring 2014 release, so there is plenty of time to make some changes.
