The age of online?

I, along with millions of other Playstation 3 owners, have been left stranded as of late by Sony and their recent fiasco involving the infamous hack and tremendously dire handling of the situation. There are already thousands of blogs, articles and videos detailing the incident so rather than tread old ground - I'll take a different approach and look at the wider picture of online gaming.

It's no secret that the vast majority of the gaming market, and indeed the biggest and most popular titles base themselves heavily on the multi player experience. In the past this would be the likes of Goldeneye, multi player not stretching further than 4 people sat around 1 television but now split screen is dead and forgotten by developers. The real multi player experience now is online. Facing off against an infinite number of different opponents, each with different playing styles, set ups, tendencies, ways of life and backgrounds from every walk and race of life. What could be better than meeting a randomer from another country on a game you like and making friends? Yeah right - it usually just ends up a slur match, but if anything that's more fun.

This seems like, and is, a fantastic leap forward in terms of connectability and technology, ensuring no man plays alone. This is why, as highlighted earlier, so many games incorporate some aspect of online play. Whether it be Demon's Souls' scarce co-op, the world known Call Of Duty multi player or even games which have NO single player mode and function only online such as MAG, game developers rarely if ever leave out online.

However, is this a good thing? Getting back to the PSN outage, millions of gamers, myself included, have been left without online. This means some people can not even play the games they may love such as MAG, as online is a requirement. For the most part however, it simply means a more lack-luster gaming experience. I'm all for a good campaign or story mode, but games like Mortal Kombat and even after 1 or 2 playthroughs of Crysis 2, I'm left hungering for online. This is an echo of the era we live in, and after this shambles I have mixed feelings over it. It used to be a game could be enjoyed for hundreds of hours while playing solo but now the massive amount of money, effort and time put into games multi player or online experiences tends to mean a short coming for the single player experience, which i think is a real shame. Maybe after this disaster for Sony, developers will start following suit of Batman Arkham City.

Arkham City, follow up to the massively successful and brilliant Batman: Arkham Asylum, recently revealed that there would be no online features in the highly anticipated game. The developers of the game spoke out their views and reinforced their belief that this would be for the best, both in interests of the game and for fans. They thought that including an online mode in what is primarily a single player game, would lead to the detriment of the single player experience, something they definitely did not want. Why provide what would in all actuality, be a sub-par or generic online experience which would cause the solo play to suffer, when they can provide no online but instead offer a fantastic single player game?

I'd love to hear other people's views on this. Should more developers follow suit and make single player only games? What are your views on the network outage and online gaming?