GamesBeat Rewind 2017: The year single-player games became chores

One of the great debates of 2017 is the “death of the single-player game,” a conversation that flared up when EA cancelled Visceral’s untitled Star Wars action-adventure and shut down the studio, seemingly because its executives didn’t see how it could make as much money as FIFA’s Ultimate Team. But the discussion that ensued quickly turned muddy, as single-player games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Mario Odyssey got rave reviews, and this in a year that had also seen The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn, to name a couple of others.

But with a few exceptions, like Mario Odyssey and Bethesda’s releases this year, the names of the single-player games being cited in these aren’t just single-player games. They’re big open-world games, designed to take up player attention over the course of weeks or even months. That’s a far cry, pun intended, from the pedigree going into Visceral’s Star Wars, with their experience with Dead Space and Amy Hennig’s work at Naughty Dog. Those kinds of games — relatively linear single-player 8-12 hour action-adventures with constrained stories — are what seems to be endangered. And some of the methods games are using to replace those kinds of stories are pretty unseemly.