Maybe it's because Era is a bit console oriented, but it's honestly remarkable how many people don't know the difference between being CPU limited and GPU limited. There are some graphical effects that are CPU heavy, such as shadows, but by and large the biggest problem stopping open world games from being 60fps on consoles is a weak CPU.
Any PC gamer who has tried to play a CPU limited open world game will tell you that no amount of graphics downgrades will significantly improve performance. You can run the game at 640x480 with everything on Low and it won't magically run at 60fps. In fact, it'll probably run exactly the same as it did on High. There is this idea that fancy visual effects onscreen are directly tied to framerate. But in many cases that isn't true.
4K is obscenely wasteful. Games that try to run at 4K or close to it are openly demonstrating their willingness to basically piss the X's GPU resources up the wall. Oh, look at me, I don't even need all this GPU power. I can just blow it rendering a stupidly large number of pixels. Games running at extremely high resolutions but NOT running at 60fps at something like 1080p is directly tied to the fact they've got oodles of GPU resources to waste, but they have a low end notebook CPU. Far Cry 5 can render the luscious scenery at basically 4K on consoles, but it can't render a human NPC further than a few hundred meters because AI is a gigantic CPU hog. The next consoles having new CPU architecture will be a game changer.
After Epic stopped working on Gears, the IP became far less relevant to the general gaming audience. Same thing happened when Bungie stopped working on Halo. When IPs are passed off to different developers, that's generally when people stop caring. There are many people who played the first three Gears/Halo games and then stopped once the original developers left.
And they were replaced by new fans. It happens. There are many people who stopped playing Assassin's Creed with AC3, but the series is still going strong. There have been plenty of game series that changed developers and are still thriving. Bethesda didn't create Fallout. But Fallout 3 was a huge success. As was Fallout 4. Machinegames didn't create Wolfenstein. But their version of Wolfenstein did well.
Gears of War was a killer app for the Xbox 360. That's no longer the case with the Xbox One. Forza is really the only killer app on Xbox these days.
How do you even quantify that? How is Gears 5, a game that will likely sell millions of copies and earn glowing reviews not a (potential) killer app?
No, I'm saying a multiplayer-centric game is one where the majority of players only care about the multiplayer.
The demographics that buy something do not decide what a work is. GoldenEye was not "multiplayer focused" or "multiplayer centric" or whatever word you wanna use. Its MP was added late in development. The game's singleplayer was a landmark for the genre and remains relevant today long after its MP has faded into a world where people played MP primarily on couches.
Where we fundamentally disagree is that you think that random people on the internet are truth itself. If people on the internet believe that a game flopped, it flopped. The sales figures -- the actual knock-on-wood truth of the matter is not important. People on the internet believe Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was a flop. It was the best selling game of 2016. They believe "everyone hates it because it's garbage". This is not true for obvious reasons.
Your "voice of the people"-esque logic would almost extend to arguing that if enough people believe a videogame is platform exclusive, then it is platform exclusive.
It is possible for a single work to have multiple fanbases. Just look at Resident Evil. Is RE a singleplayer survival horror series or a co-op series? Both answers are true in different contexts. RE5/6/Revelations 2 are in the middle. They are perfectly good singleplayer games that can also be played in co-op.
Trying to use argumentum ad populum to "prove" that Resident Evil is one thing or the other is not a good argument. I know that's just fancy Latin, but taking a step back, your entire argument is that if "people" don't believe a game is singleplayer, then the game is not singleplayer. Words like "tacked on" are nonsensical semantic nonsense at this point. A game with singleplayer where the singleplayer is the primary focus of game development because it's super hard to make and requires dozens of millions of dollars -- that game is not "MP focused with tacked on MP". MP fans can believe that all they want. They can also believe that the campaign was "probably tossed together in six months" if they want. They can believe "nobody cares about the campaign" all they want. Doesn't make it true.
You know, another example that comes to mind is AC: Odyssey and Kassandra. Kassandra is the canon female protagonist. There are multiple things pointing to it. The novel, the fact her bird is male, the fact Deimos is a male deity so she doesn't fit the role, and stuff like that.
2/3s of AC: Odyssey players chose to play as Alexios instead. Just because 2/3 chose Alexios does not mean that Alexios is the canon protagonist. It does not make AC: Odyssey a "male protagonist focused" game. Some might cite death of the author here, but the audience's opinions or demographics do not change fundamental truths about a work.
If a game developer creates games for PC and then ports those games to console, the game is "PC oriented". This is factual. Beyond dispute. If the console version sells more copies, that doens't mean the console version is the original version. This is another one of those weird quirks. People often assume that games are console first and then ported to PC. And their entire logic process is "Well, the console version sold more, therefore most fans must be console gamers, therefore it must be the primary version."
Assassin's Creed used to have a multiplayer mode but the majority of players didn't care about it so Ubisoft eventually scrapped it.
Ubisoft panicked after the release of AC: Unity, which didn't feature PvP MP like its predecessors but featured co-op. AC multiplayer was always popular. AC: Unity switching from PvP to co-op attracted criticism. The game was rushed, unpolished, and this led Ubisoft to rethink their development practices. They are currently considering bringing back multiplayer in future AC titles. Removing it had zilch to do with "players didn't care about it". It was corner cutting.
Fortnite started as a co-op game but the vast majority of players only care about its BR mode so classifying it as a BR game is accurate. The focus of the majority of players is what determines if a game is SP- or MP-centric.
Fortnite and Fortnite: Battle Royale are two different games. You're straying into a weird argument here -- that the game's GENRE is determined by its F2P spinoff. Really? By your logic, every single game that incorporates a Battle Royale that becomes popular is now a Battle Royale game in and of itself. You gotta be more nuanced that that. If 343 caved and released an F2P Halo Infinite Battle Royale spinoff, you would then claim that Halo Infinite is a Battle Royale title. This is like saying that if a techno group release a rock song that is a huge smash, the entire album it comes from is now a "rock album" and they are a "rock band".
In terms of production values, you are absolutely right. In terms of actual gameplay and level design? CoD and BF campaigns are pretty lackluster. They are equivalent to Michael Bay movies: all style and no substance. Rigidly linear and scripted level design, overly reliant on set-pieces, no meaningful weapon or enemy variety, minimal player agency. Glorified shooting galleries, really. They've barely evolved since CoD4 which is why they feel stale and forgettable. CoD and BF campaigns are basically super expensive spectacles but not much else.
I can't help feeling you probably haven't played a Call of Duty campaign or a Battlefield campaign in a very long time. Battlefield: Hardline was a STEALTH game. The polar opposite of most of what you describe. A game where killing people was almost always your choice and thematically discouraged by your role as a straight arrow police officer. Where the player was placed in sort of wide linear environments and given the freedom to play how they wanted. Battlefield V's general genre shifts from one campaign to the next, but they typically focus on combining stealth and shooting depending on the player's choice. Instead of highly scripted set pieces, Battlefield V largely favors moderate sized sandbox environments where the player can approach them however they want. I'm not sure how anyone could play a recent Battlefield campaign and say, "Oh, yea, when I was freely exploring a non-linear environment using stealth? That was rigidly linear and overly reliant on set pieces. Just a glorified shooting gallery with minimal player agency."
Call of Duty, for its part, has been all over the place design and experimentation wise. I think they're ultimately a bit more conservative than DICE, which has led to them pandering to players a bit much. Less willing to rock the boat. The different developers try different ideas. I have a major problem with your argument on this point. You're someone claiming that Call of Duty does not qualify as a singleplayer story-driven cinematic game of any note. And then your list of supposed complaints is indistinguishable from a list of complaints against something like Uncharted or The Last of Us. Do you like ANY cinematic games? At all?
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 featured a storyline that changed in response to the player's choices both visible and invisible, with several endings. Any person who has played Black Ops II will tell you how their mind was blown when they discovered a certain hostage rescue was not in fact scripted to fail. When they released that a small but effective assortment of player choices like "I will run really fast and maybe I'll get there in time, " or "I'll drive more carefully here" had a tangible consequence.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare cribbed a lot from Crysis 2. Offering combat arena level design with solid levels of verticality in some cases. You were also given gadgets you could deploy at will. With this game, the series tried to allow players to use tools to solve combat scenarios instead of using those gadgets only in context sensitive situations. It also had a really good plot and some top notch set piece design. (Black Ops 3, which was a mess but a curious mess, took these ideas of player tools in any combat scenario even further.)
Call of Duty: WWII was a bit too safe for my tastes -- with the best mission in the game being the female protagonist French Resistance meeting where you infiltrate the Nazi HQ undercover and try to keep your disguise intact, before adopting a Wolfenstein-esque approach to stealth -- but it offered huge tactical freedom during combat encounters. Call of Duty hasn't embraced the sandbox like Battlefield has, but the rails are increasingly being rubbed away. This was paired with the studio finally removing regenerating health, something that Infinite Warfare had offered in its Specialist Difficulty where you had non-regenerating health, limb damage, and stuff like that. Uncharted 4's influence is quite clear on WWII in particular how it handles vehicle sections. Where an older game might have a single linear route and you fail if you go the wrong way, WWII handles it fluidly. You just follow the train, and wherever you drive leads you to the destination. This is a wide linear, rubber banding approach to level design in FPS games that feels more organic.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, for its part, is an amazing game. A love letter to Wing Commander that is the closest thing to Squadron 42 you're likely to get from a mainstream developer for the foreseeable future. It had a bunch of novel innovations. A bigger focus on stealth options during missions. The ability to choose side missions from the war table. Flying around in space, dogfighting. It wasn't super complex dog-fighting, but it was fun. It also has fantastic writing and acting courtesy of Brian Bloom.
Battlefield features single-player but I wouldn't be surprised if they just cut it entirely in the future.
Highly unlikely.
Titanfall didn't have single-player until TF2 and it still bombed. The franchise is likely dead now.
Titanfall 1 didn't have a campaign because they ran out of money. The campaign was by far the most expensive part of the game, and they ran into trouble. Titanfall 2's campaign was rather outstanding. And Titanfall 3 is currently in development. Remember -- EA are rather generous. Look at Crysis. They published Crysis. Sold okay. Published Crysis 2. Sold okay, but they were a bit disappointed. But they gave the developers another chance, and that was Crysis 3. Which... tanked super hard, but at least they tried. Respawn are working on both Titanfall 3 and the new Star Wars game.
Several single-player Star Wars games have already been canceled (like 1313 and Visceral's game).
1313 was cancelled by Lucasarts, not EA. Visceral's development hell project has been recycled into another Star Wars game that is presumably also singleplayer. EA are dedicated to singleplayer. They're just savvy enough to realise that audiences aren't hugely fond of 5-10 hour long games. So they either make open world ones or they pair the moderate length game with multiplayer to ensure it sells.
There's long been a prevalent belief that consumers won't accept $60 games that don't include both single-player or multiplayer modes. That's why Tomb Raider 2013 had a multiplayer mode and why Uncharted and TLOU had them as well. In recent years, publishers have become more comfortable going with single-player only games, though that usually translates to "open-world and enough filler to last 100+ hours."
Bubsy 3D had multiplayer. The Bubsy 3D team made a game called Syphon Filter. It didn't have MP. But every single sequel did. Adding multiplayer to game sequels is a super old thing. People just pretended to be surprised when it happened to Tomb Raider, as you mention. I always find it weird how some folks act as though Tomb Raider 2013 having multiplayer was some kind of oddity for the series considering Rise of the Tomb Raider has multiplayer. And so does Shadow of the Tomb Raider. They switched to a form of co-op multiplayer because that obviously makes more sense for the genre, but as the success of those Lara Croft co-op spinoff games back in the day showed, audiences do enjoy co-op Tomb Raiding and puzzle solving. The business logic is sound. Tomb Raider+Friends=Good stuff.
