It is crazy how some posters don't seem to understand that the COD fanbase (same goes for Battlefield etc) generally just don't care about SP.
People quote the % of people getting the SP trophies/cheevos but how many of those play it cos it is there but mainly play MP?
Its just an MP focussed game. I strongly think these MP focussed games should forget their rubbish SP campaigns and focus on strong MP offerings. BFV would be far better off if it ditched the campaign and had more MP maps etc....
This kinda overlooks that multiplayer is simply more popular than singleplayer regardless of series or genre. Counter-Strike and Team Fortress are far, far, far more popular than Half-Life, for instance. A singleplayer game will never sell the kind of numbers that multiplayer games do, at least not consistently. The reason these fanbases don't care is a demographics problem. The Rainbow 6 fanbase doesn't care about singleplayer because Ubisoft cultivated an MP fanbase with Siege. Does this mean that Rainbow 6 shouldn't feature a campaign because this new audience doesn't care about it? Arguably no.
Taken to its logical premise, you've basically got: "Don't bother making singleplayer games because any singleplayer game that ends up with popular multiplayer will attract an audience that doesn't care about singleplayer and then it's all over." This is a trend that goes back to GoldenEye. GoldenEye was a singleplayer game. Its chief contributions to game design revolved around its campaign. It sold 8+ million copies in part because it had popular multiplayer. A lot of GoldenEye MP fans consider the game to be "MP oriented" because that was the part of the game they cared about.
MP fans can "claim" a series in basically one entry. Look at Call of Duty. CoD 4: Modern Warfare was the game that sold many times more copies than its predecessors, and in the process gained a new audience that didn't care about singleplayer. In the space of a year Call of Duty gained an audience with sentiments like, "Why would you buy this for the campaign?" Like I said, a huge bulk of Rainbow 6's audience thinks the series is "MP oriented". They've never played a Rainbow 6 game before Siege. They especially haven't played the original trilogy.
The same thing happend to Titanfall. The original game's campaign had to be scrapped due to money issues. This meant that Titanfall 1's audience was entirely MP folks. Then along comes Titanfall 2. Its campaign gets great raves, just like its sister game, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. But Titanfall 2 was perceived as "MP-oriented". Despite widespread acclaim there was a sentiment of "Why would you buy this for the campaign?" This happens to any series that gains a dominant multiplayer fanbase. And multiplayer fanbases typically dominate through demographics.
Looking back, imagine if Crysis 2 had managed to hit it big with its multiplayer, which was designed by Crytek UK, aka Free Radical. Crysis 2 sold okay. But its campaign got great reviews and it's a well liked game for good reason. Crysis is regarded as a singleplayer series. Its MP never really took off. Crysis 2 multiplayer is pretty damn good. It just failed to find an audience, particularly on consoles, kinda like Titanfall 2, a game it bears interestingly resemblance to.
But imagine an alternate scenario. Imagine Crysis 2 selling 5-10 million copies. It's still the exact same game. It just had better marketing and it went viral. Crysis 2 would have gained a huge multiplayer fanbase in the process. Then Crysis 3 would come along 2 years later. In the real world, Crysis 3 was a huge flop. But imagine an alternate scenario where Crysis 2 had a huge MP fanbase and they went out and bought Crysis 3. In the space of a single game, you've ended up with a game becoming "MP oriented" not because anything changed on the game's end but because its demographics changed. Nothing really changed with Call of Duty. But Call of Duty 4 gained a new demographic that was significantly bigger than the audience that plays singleplayer FPS games. Singleplayer FPS games don't sell 30 million copies.
What I'm trying to get at is that this attitude leaves developers between a rock and a hard place. If they try to keep their game "pure" by refusing to add multiplayer they risk low sales. (Just as Machinegames and Wolfenstein II. Future Wolfenstein games are gonna have MP in them. There's no alternative.) But if they add multiplayer there's a risk it'll backfire and they'll gain millions of fans who don't care about the part of the game they put so much heart and soul into. It's like running a fish and chip shop and your coffee becomes hugely popular. The new coffee audience doesn't give a shit about fish and chips. Your fish and chip audience still comes to your shop. But the coffee audience is huge and vocal and constantly complaints that you "waste your time" with the fish and chip audience that is smaller than them, and they resent that they have to wait in line for coffee because you're serving fish and chips, too. This is a fairly one sided thing. Singleplayer fans don't typically take over multiplayer series. It's just demographically improbable. MP is bigger. Always will be. Battlefield games can have the best campaigns in the world, but the audience that wants to play Battlefield MP will always be bigger.
Look at Battlefield: Hardline. They could have branded it differently. It's basically a police stealth game wearing the Battlefield brand. But the Battlefield MP audience is huge. It makes sense to try and sell copies to them. Trying to sell a game like Battlefield: Hardline as a singleplayer experience with no multiplayer would have been suicide. That's just the reality of it. It's why Dead Space 3 is a co-op game. EA call these games Battlefield because that's a brand with a huge inbuilt MP audience that will buy these games. It's the same reason Activision insist these games are called Call of Duty. Modern Warfare was supposed to be a different series. But Activision didn't want that. Something like Infinite Warfare, for instance, could have been sold as a completely separate IP. A singleplayer sci-fi shooter. But the Call of Duty brand means more sales. The problem is the Call of Duty audience is so heavy dominated by multiplayer fans. You gain more sales because there's so many of them. But you taint your game, basically. Infinite Warfare would have been a universally acclaimed singleplayer FPS if simply called Infinite Warfare. But because it was called Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, it had all the baggage of the angry Call of Duty multiplayer fanbase that didn't care how good the campaign was. They need those sales.
That's a damn shame to hear. Wish they'd have gone with Advanced Warfare 2 last year instead then.
It wasn't palatable due to the immense backlash against Infinite Warfare that has since vanished into nothing because millions of people managed to become "sick" of WWII games in approximately 12-24 months.
