Case Study: How Online Gaming Is Mandatory Even for Single-Player

Understanding the appeal of the majority of AAA companies in putting online features in linear games or single player games is something that we’ve seen these past years. While there are many good reasons behind these connections, we have to wonder about the options that most players have when they want to enjoy a simple offline adventure.

The Reason Behind Forced Online

One of the main reasons why games are allowing their single-player campaign to be connected to online almost all times is to try to optimize the experience and search for possible bugs and send reports of these flaws.

We understand that videogames aren’t perfect, and with technology evolving so quickly, finding bugs in videogames has become something so basic in the industry that they need new ways to approach them and make a proper patch.

The Destiny Problem

Bungie is a well-known AAA company that always delivers the best videogames around, they surprised all their gamers with the release of Destiny, a fun shooter with elements of RPG and is also heavily focused on online interactions, being their main objective while they were making the game.

But as their other entries, they have chosen to make a campaign mode, something that pleased the expectations of the fans a lot, since they are always up for some good old campaign mode.

Sadly, this campaign mode was a feature that needed to be connected to the internet at all times, making it quite impossible for players who didn’t want to connect their consoles to something impossible to reach. Some players also didn’t have an internet connection, making the whole game useless for these players.

The Problems That Comes with Forced Online

There are many gamers that choose to enjoy their videogames in an offline mode since they might be interested in spending some time disconnected from the World Wide Web and distract themselves with a game.

If this is the case, they might not be able to. Since there’s a long list of games that are including online features on their single player campaign, making the term “offline mode” almost obsolete.

While there are a handful of games that are still playable even though you deactivated your online features, a lot of games are now having a wall that doesn’t let you play the game at all.

The future for offline players is uncertain since there are fewer games that are being developed to be “online-free”, even if the game is not multiplayer, there is always going to be a new online feature.