The Tomb Raider Problem

Recently I purchased the new Tomb Raider game having heard many good things about the game via reviews and word of mouth.  I initially gave it a few days before starting the single player campaign so that I could fully commit to it without being distracted by things I had to do on other games or to a lesser extent, my life.

Once started though I found the campaign extremely difficult thing to stop player, a testament to this being the first evening where it took me after 5 hours of playing to finally turn it off to get sleep.  The game looks amazing, the story draws you in and makes you want to keep playing to find out how Lara actually gets off the island, and the gameplay is as good as Tomb Raider has ever been.  I would wholly recommend this game to anyone who loved the original Tomb Raider games, and also to anyone who loves a good adventure game.  As with all good games it has it's downsides; the overall story is quite short considering the pure brilliance of the story and the other one being collectibles.  This however is a personal preference because I much prefer to play a storyline rather than spend my free time looking for obscure pointless things that are hidden around the world.  You can always extend the story playing time by hunting the collectibles during the story but I get to distracted by my quest/goal to easily.

The single player is brilliant however I have reached a major problem with the game; the as titled 'Tomb Raider Problem'.

The problem is the second half of the game; the multiplayer.  I can only point blame to the huge successes of games like Call of Duty and Halo that have made the gaming industry think that almost every game has to have online multiplayer.  It's my own personal opinion, and from what I've read from general consensus, that the multiplayer is shockingly terrible and a pointless addition to the game.  To me Tomb Raider has always been a single player game and not a game where I thought the ability to play against each other is what the game was missing.

Even though the online multiplayer has put a massive dent in the game, it has shifted over 3 million copies since release which is a reasonably solid display.  Square Enix however have seen this as a failure compared that their financial expectations for the game.  I get the feeling that if Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics had got rid of the multiplayer and instead concentrated on the single player then they could have sold so many more copies of the game.  If they had invested all that time on extending the single player campaign, enriching the experience even more then this new revamp of the series would have been a phenomenal success.

The issue is that everything has to have multiplayer nowadays and too many games companies can't just plan for a totally single player game.  The companies are too focused on trying to achieve sales of Call of Duty's magnitude to not realise that there is still a big market for good, solid single player games.  You only have to look at games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 and the Arkham series of Batman games to show you that totally single player games still have a place in the gaming world.

I still hold a considerable amount of hope that the generalised collection of games companies will realise that online multiplayer isn't required in every single game, and that they lower their expectations and stop striving for sales figures that are ridiculously high.  But maybe that is a fools hope.