A new appreciation for Story-Mode
I’ve come to have a whole new appreciation for single-player story-mode based 3D games lately. Don’t get me wrong, multiplayer and MMO games are great and will keep the fun going for decades and thousands of years. We’ll never get enough of it, yet thats just the trouble. I find that in my ever-maturing adulthood, my responsibilities are taking up more of my time. I don’t have the time to sit down and dedicate hours on end to playing rounds and rounds of Counter-Strike: Source with my buddies or even more time consuming MMORPGs building up my characters and empires.
So recently I began playing the Half-Life 2 single player story mode to finish it. I started doing that because a friend of mine told me that after finishing it he was impressed with a lot of it and had a lot of enjoyable hours playing it, and it took him a while to do. So on my journey I went..all on my own into the unknown universe of HL2. Little did I know I would be enjoying the story as much as I am. The game is full of twists and surprises.
I find that I can set aside an hour or so every so often to get into it. So when I do I am greeted with this personal story I’ve been involved in since I started it. This is MY adventure. This isn’t some server that I just happened to stumble into which had an already in-progress match going on. It isn’t just shoot to kill and try and save a hostage or blow up a site or something. There’s always a new objective. There’s always a surprise. Multiplayer games are just predictable killing and team-based strategies usually.
Don’t think I don’t realize the fact that this sounds strangely oxi-moronic. Several years ago when multi player games started becoming popular you probably would have heard people saying the opposite is true. I probably said it myself even. Back then all you knew was single-player monotony. The multi player aspect soon became the new “unpredictable” and offered a change of pace which brought on a heart-racing excitement that you just didn’t find in most single player ones.
The pace has once again changed I believe and story mode games are becoming a whole new unpredictable realm of fun. Of course in story mode you play it once and then you know how it goes, but there are sometimes sequels and new episodes. The length of a story-mode single player game is also an important element. If the developers made the story short then you would beat it and quickly find yourself looking for something else to do.
Something else that is making story-mode more versatile and interesting is this thing called Co-Op Story Mode. Its multi-player story mode where you and other people go into the story mode and play it together. Generally since you have more than one person on the good side fighting the bad, then you would turn the difficulty up a notch or two. That way you might see something a bit different than you would in the typical single-player story mode on a standard difficulty level. It can be interesting seeing more monsters and stuff, but overwhelming if you had to fight them all off yourself.
So I go into the HL2 story mode every so often and have a little personal adventure finding and discovering some really interesting things that would otherwise be unknown if I had just played the multi player games all the time. I might find myself purchasing the Episode One and then Episode Two later on after I complete the first one.