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First and foremost, there is only one or two games on the market that are both good games (technically speaking), and multi-player only. The two I know of are Everquest and TRIBES. Both of these require an internet connection of some kind to play anything other than training missions. And both of these games have a decent popularity, enough such that you can find other people playing. Everyone felt Id was risking a lot by making a multi-player only game. I would agree if Id were actually going to make a multi-player only game. But they aren't. Neither is Epic with their upcoming title Unreal Tournament. These two companies are more chicken (or more intelligent) than to risk their huge popularity on something as radical in design as TRIBES. Both Quake III Arena (Q3A) and Unreal Tournament (UT) will have a single player mode that will simulate those vicous online deathmatches and team games we know are big hits. In effect, we are not seeing a huge growth of multi-player only games, but instead a growth of multi-play centered games.

There are still people who will say, "But I don't like Death Match. I want Half-Life again." Unless there is some quota on the number of games that can be written in a year, I don't see why Id and Epic making multi-player centered games would keep other companies from making games like Half-Life. If anything, with an intense single-player game no longer a concern, the engines will see more attention to better graphics, better network code, and less bugs. Plus, single-player based engines tend to have very crappy weapon spreads. A single-player game has a progression of less powerful to more powerful weapons. This leaves you with useless weapons like the blaster in Quake II. But in a multi-player centered game (such as TRIBES), even the `smaller' weapons are useful because they aren't watered down for single-player scenarios. If the Q3A engine is a good bit better just because they didn't have to work on a single-player side of the game, and Valve makes Helf-Life 2 with Q3A's better engine and cool AI ... well, that's GOOD.

In the end, nothing has really changed. Some companies are getting more time to do more of what they do better. When it comes down to it, the consumer gets the final vote with the spending of their hard earned cash. Don't buy it if there's no demo, and don't buy it if the demo doesn't make you want to. There's that demo thing again.

since june 7 1999