Locked Multiplayer Content

Ever start up one of those multiplayer-centric games that are great for parties (too bad everything's moving to online-only multiplayer these days) and find that most of the content is "locked" and can only be made available by investing enough time in the single-player game modes? What's the point of that anyway? People who play the multiplayer mode are obviously not going to bother with single-player, yet they can't have any fun with it until they do so.

So why can't all the characters/maps/items/gametypes/whatevers in the multiplayer game be available from the beginning? I'm thinking that it would be because there would be no rewards for the solo player to shoot for, so there needs to be something better to replace it. What do you think? Is there a trope for this yet?

Metroid Prime: Hunters and Star Fox: Assault come to mind. In the first's case, mainly the Hunters and the Stages, most of the good weapons and all of the modes are available from the start. In the latter's case, most of the stages and characters are already there, its the modes and weapons that aren't open. Some of Assault's unlockables are a real pain, Metroid's are more straight forward, you can look at single player as "training mode".

This is not as obvious as you think. It's quite possible to enjoy both solo play and multi play.

Games with single player content at all usually expect you to start with SP mode.

But what if you just got, say, the latest Smash Bros. game and you and your friends want to play it right away? You start the game and find that you can only select from half of the available characters and stages and such. If you want the rest, you have to shoo your friends out of the room so you can play the single-player modes to unlock it all.

Why not take turns playing through the SP content? Direct competition/coop isn't the only form of offline multiplay.

Smash, like most fighting games, uses the simple enough solution of allowing you to unlock everything with repeated MP fights.

I got Brink, which has a multiplayer component with emphasis on co-operation and I chose to play through the Resistance campaign in Solo mode.

edited 14th Aug '11 12:00:01 AM by RocketDude

Simple.

• Increase longevity and freshness of the game.
• Some people like stories in their games...but others don't play the single player mode without incentives to do so, even if they would have liked the story mode.
• there is a lot more people who like being forced to unlock those characters while playing through story mode than there are who likes everything handed to them from the start
• Single player mode is also good getting noobs to get a grasp on the gameplay before they embarass themselves online
• it gives a feeling of "they put extra work to give us even more characters!" even if they were already there.
• lastly....to give incentive for people to fully experience the game. If there were no incentives to play single player, most people will forget it even existed, and in the future people will remember that game as "the stupid crossover fighter with nothing but multiplayer fights and no story"...that's bad for reputation.

PS - also gives a sense of surprise. Many people did not know there was a Cyber Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat 9, and that he would be an unlockable. Actually getting him as an unlockable character leaves a pleasant impression on many people who were genuinely surprised by it.

edited 15th Aug '11 12:40:38 PM by Signed

I think Rock Band handled the unlockable multiplayer content well. Several cheats were available right from the start that allowed you to unlock all the songs, stages, characters, etc. These cheats also disabled saving and online play, so all this would only be unlocked until you turned off the console. This allowed you to unlock everything and play it "the real way", but you could also get a party going and have everything available for a single session of play.