scotland wrote:ptdebate wrote: Sometimes the discussion on this site leaves you with an impression that modern, online, multiplayer gaming is somehow a lesser experience than traditional offline gaming. In truth it's the best thing about videogames these days.
If you could game with your brother in the same room, or online, which is best?
I'd pick in person gaming every time. Its a different and better experience for me. The criticism with modern gaming isn't that online gaming is bad, its that its been an exchange for couch co-op gaming.
Oh, me too for sure. I frequently do game with my brother in person but he lives a couple hours' drive from me so whereas we can do couch co-op maybe once a week or less, we can game online for half an hour here and there multiple times a week.
Online multiplayer allows me and my brother to connect with people despite the limitations of distance. This is particularly helpful as we get older. My brother and I have very different work schedules. He works from home so whenever he's not on the phone with a client and I am at home on my off day or after work, he can easily swivel the office chair to the other end of the office and fire up the Xbox.
I guess for me the question that comes to mind is "why not both"? We have just as many local multiplayer games available now as we ever have (particularly indies). The retro games still exist too. People tend to make zero sum games out of two alternatives that actually don't diminish each other in any way. They see franchises like Call of Duty or Halo flirting with going single-player only but miss all of the new multiplayer games popping up at the same time.