Okay, I admit I went for a bit of a sensationalist title there, but there's something that's been seriously bothering me - how common online multiplayer is a selling point in games these days. It's not that I don't enjoy online multiplayer - hell, TF2 is pretty much one of my favorite games of all time, and I can think of few games I've sunk more hours into. However, I feel like TF2 is something of an exception - it's a number of years old, and it's still incredibly popular. Many games, though, sell you on their multiplayer, which may even be great, but then the community dries up after a few months after everyone moves to the next big thing. Worse, give it a couple of years, and most games have their servers just shut down permanently. Then you're stuck with a game that may be only half-functional at best (assuming the singleplayer content was any good). Heck, in the case of MMOs, the entire game goes away and you literally never get to experience it again. I'm still reeling from the shutdown of City of Heroes. I was a huge fan of that game for many years, but then they decided it wasn't profitable anymore and they just shut it down - and bam, it was like all of those wonderful experiences I had were suddenly gone forever.

I certainly understand the reasoning for this - the game industry loves it because it helps keep people buying the latest thing, and besides, there's a limited number of gamers for an ever-increasing number of games, so yeah, online communities will eventually die. However, that's just something I don't like about modern games, the way the focus on multiplayer has almost created an environment of planned obsolescence. I mean, I can pick up a copy of Mario 3, and it works exactly the same as it did the day it came out. There isn't a single aspect of the game that was present in the beginning that has since gone away. However, if, say, I load up the original Halo, for example, there's an entire section of the game which is permanently locked off from me and I will never be able to experience that aspect of the game. Not that I care about Halo, it was just the first example that came to my head. I don't know, maybe I'm weird like that, but it just really bothers me that modern games have come to this point where the fundamental experience gets changed over time.