6 Games That Didn’t Need Multiplayer Tacked On

Doom

Doom, alongside its sequel, Doom Eternal, is hands-down one of the best single-player FPS games to come out in recent memory. It and Titanfall 2 proved last-gen that shooters don’t always need to be entirely focused on multiplayer and that there’s a market for just the story and gameplay experience that doesn’t need to involve other people.

You’d be forgiven if you forgot that, at least in the case of Doom, there was a multiplayer mode as well. It had a few game modes and experimented with a Demon Rune that allowed players to transform into a demon, which likely formed the basis of Doom Eternal’s multiplayer.

But at the end of the day, it’s not what the fans are buying Doom for, nor is it what they are staying for. At least in the case of Doom (2016) further adding to the game’s single-player features probably would have been the better call.

Doom Eternal mixed things up a bit with its multiplayer and the dev team was still able to deliver it successfully alongside significant additions to the single-player through the addition of story DLC, Master Levels, and other neat features such as free cosmetics and other unlocks.

At the end of the day, though, while Doom’s multiplayer is fine, and there are plenty of people who love it, it would take a lot to ever shift the public perception and get people thinking that Doom is a multiplayer game.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Here’s a case of a game that really should have just focused all of their resources on the single-player experience and then, maybe, later on, deliver the multiplayer if they still wanted to.

Mass Effect 3 surprised a lot of players with how fun its multiplayer was. While many were worried it would take away from the single-player experience and/or would just be bad, it turned out that BioWare is capable of doing both single-player and multiplayer on a good day if they set their mind to it.

It’s not surprising that Mass Effect Andromeda would try to replicate this success. After all, Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer to this day, even in 2021 has people playing it.

This time around, though, BioWare couldn’t nail both and failed in attempting to stick the landing for single-player and multiplayer at the same time.

The multiplayer in Andromeda played like an afterthought. It wasn’t nearly as fun to play. It wasn’t balanced as well, it was lacking content, and unlike Mass Effect 3, where it was supported long after release with new characters, BioWare gave up on Andromeda’s multiplayer pretty much instantly.

Uncharted & The Last of Us

Similar to Doom earlier in the article, both of these series are well-known for being among the best single-player games around. Both series appeared in our top 15 games of the last decade.

Very few people that are able to appreciate a great story are going to walk away from playing games like Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us and feel like they were robbed of their price of admission.

Why then did Naughty Dog feel the need to tack on a multiplayer mode then? Both of the multiplayer game modes found in these games are inoffensive, but they are just also kind of…there.

Maybe Naughty Dog got caught up in the whole “Project Ten Dollar” scare. Or maybe they are just really passionate about multiplayer. Who knows?

While there are plenty of people who like the multiplayer modes in these games, there are likely plenty more people that just completely ignored it and beelined straight for the campaigns. To each their own.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

This one might be a hot take for some reading this. Lots of people really enjoy the multiplayer in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s fun to visit other people’s islands to explore and find new things to forage for.

However, it really could have been a lot more, or at the very least, it could be something closer to what was featured even in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which had more things to do with your visiting friends. There were multiplayer tours that you and a friend could go on that allowed you to play various minigames together for prizes.

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons you’re mostly left up to your imagination on what you want to for fun which is… fine, but it’s not something that is going to go down as being particularly memorable once the novelty wears off.

Super Mario Galaxy

While some of the other games on this list may have had some great ideas that didn’t pan out or featured multiplayer modes that were fine, but just kind of unnecessary, Super Mario Galaxy’s multiplayer is just straight-up dumb.

Super Mario Galaxy is arguably one of the greatest 3D platformers of all-time but its multiplayer mode is just embarrassing and un-fun for player two.

While player one got to bounce around as Mario doing all his usual fun stuff, player 2 got to control… an icon. Just a little star icon that could be moved around like a mouse pointer. This person had the all-important job of just collecting items that Mario could have gotten himself in two seconds later.

Yep, this one is the definition of tacked-on, poorly thought out multiplayer. But hey, at least the game is great.

---