Despite the industry’s dogged insistence that multiplayer “live-service” games are the future, what the majority of gamers really want to see are single-player, story driven experiences.
The current-generation consoles have seen their fair share of excellent single-player experiences of course. Marvel’s Spider-Man, God of War, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, to name just a few. Unfortunately, it’s one area that I think most can agree the Xbox One has been sorely lacking in.
The good news is that as all eyes start to fall on the upcoming new hardware from Xbox and PlayStation, both companies seemed committed to making sure the future is packed with single-player experiences.
Back in July, President and CEO of Sony’s PlayStation division Jim Ryan confirmed that the company would “never abandon” single-player. Now, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has shared a similar commitment with Xbox fans.
Replying to a user on Twitter, Spencer specifically mentioned the number of third-party studios Microsoft acquired and added to the Xbox Game Studios family last year. He pointed out that many of these teams have a strong track record in single-player games, and Xbox wants that to continue. Sounds good to me.
Among the studios Microsoft picked up last year are Ninja Theory (Hellblade), Compulsion Games (We Happy Few), and Playground Games (Forza).
While we don’t know what the first two studios are working on right now, it has been all but confirmed that Playground Games are currently working on a new entry in the Fable franchise, which is expected to release on Xbox Scarlett at some point in the next few years.
We also know that Halo Infinite will be a launch title for Scarlett when it releases Holiday 2020. It’ll presumably feature an in-depth campaign, as well as the usual bevy of multiplayer modes we’ve come to expect from a Halo title.
In the more immediate future, Gears 5 is coming to Xbox One in just a few days and apparently boasts the largest campaign in the franchise to date.
Between all the studios Microsoft has picked up and PlayStation’s single-player dominance of this generation, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Spencer and Xbox have no intention of repeating this gen’s mistakes when the next-generation lands.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.