We already knew that Assassin’s Creed: Mirage would take the series back to its more focused roots, but Ubisoft is also taking the throwback approach with a new 2D Prince of Persia game. Alan Wake 2 and Daymare 1994: Sandcastle look to deliver adventure horror vibes alongside the more intense survival horror of Silent Hill 2. Starfield, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora absolutely fit the bill of everything-soup games, but Avowed reportedly takes a more streamlined approach to RPG design. What’s exciting, though, isn’t just the volume it’s the breadth. With Summer Game Fest, the Future Games Show, Xbox Games Showcase, and others, there was a wealth of single-player games.
Thankfully, almost every other presentation stepped into the breach.
Following on from EA leaning heavily into multiplayer not all that long ago, it’s an encouraging sign, especially with Jedi: Survivor, Wild Hearts, and Immortals of Aveum among its 2023 bookings. One of the most intriguing nuggets is that EA is sunsetting BioWare’s involvement with Star Wars: The Old Republic to focus on single-player games. The real turning point, though, has been the showcase season of recent weeks and some of the news that’s coincided with that. Since then, the single-player games of 2023 have gone from strength to strength: Hogwarts Legacy, Atomic Heart, Tchia, Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and - of course - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Compare that to this year, when the much slimmer Hi-Fi Rush and Dead Space remake dominated mindshare. Almost all of those five games are sprawling beasts. Although… maybe those examples highlight part of the reason. It’s not like recent years haven’t been frontloaded with excellence, whether that’s Resident Evil 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3 in 2019 or Dying Light 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Elden Ring just last year. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes 2023 feel so different. Let me be clear - more than a few great games have stood out from the morass, but it’s never felt like the promise of distinct, exciting single-player games quite reached the critical mass that it has now.
And most recently, there’s been the arms race to maximum content with the addition of an endless trickle of live-service elements. Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Mafia III, and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst are just a few names that spring to mind to characterize the phase. The mandate saw some of the uniqueness shaved off everything from Dead Space to Assassin’s Creed to God of War to make the core gameplay transferable to the expectations of a multiplayer audience.įrom there, we ran headlong into the open-world era, where the single-player experience became an everything soup of mismatched mechanics and madcap map markers. The age of multiplayer was thrust upon us, and the result was that everything had to be playable with others. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare burst onto the scene and reshaped the landscape overnight.
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It’s not that they disappeared or became universally bland, but the rough patch can be traced back to 2007. Certain successes, certain failures, and the distinct tenor of this year’s not-E3 season have me more hopeful for the future of single-player games than I have been in quite some time. I’ve written before about how that sapped my enthusiasm for single-player games, but I mention it again now because 2023 feels like a year of correction. There’s been a persistent (and completely understandable) tendency towards trend-chasing. Single-player games have felt mired in a swamp of carefully crafted sameness for a long while now, especially at the big end of town.
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