As I played the first 4 minutes of We the Giants I was both intrigued and a little excited. I wanted to see where this cute, yet somewhat tragic game would take me. As I saw my final objective, a lone sacrifice among a stack of 4 Giants, I carefully considered my final words to this world. When my thoughts were fully fleshed out into 132 distinct characters, I was ready to bless this game with my deeply important wisdom. Only, when I clicked the submit button, nothing happened. I tried multiple strategies to fulfill my sacrifice, all to no avail. It turns out there was some sort of bug or issue that restricted my participation in this game. Damn. I closed out the game in failure. I didn’t even feel like restarting.
I mention this moment because I think it speaks to the question of what you can get from a game when you physically can’t interact with its multiplayer aspects. Commonly, this would occur at times when one doesn’t have Internet access, but it can also happen if the game is too old and the company stopped running the servers. Or, if you’re like me, you had an old Xbox 360 that couldn’t connect to WiFi or Ethernet so you played Black Ops 1 alone and without bots and GTA5 without online.
Of course, many games have single-player offline modes (or at least they used too, we could discuss that issue also) so, usually, being restricted from online doesn’t completely ruin the experience (I mean, I still technically got the point of We the Giants). My question, is that in today’s expansive multiplayer experiences, how much do you miss out by not being able to participate? Is it worse that you can’t choose to participate, or is it a blessing in disguise to enjoy the offline aspects to the fullest? Is the online factor considered more important than the offline part? Should designers prepare gameplay for players who can't access online for any reason, or is it just the fault of the player for not having proper equipment/internet? Regardless, screw Microsoft for making terrible Xbox 360's, I'm salty.