My recent one game deduction in the form of Super Street Fighter IV for the X-Box 360 has made me wonder how far-fetch the impact of my decision to leave X-Box LIVE Gold truly is. The main reason why I sold my copy of SSFIV was because I don't have access to the online multiplayer feature and upgrading it to the upcoming Arcade Edition is still not going to remedy the situation. Thus, I should just pick up the Personal Computer version so I can get back to playing it online. Things would have been different if I actually have real people to play it with in my Game Room, in which I don't. As we all know, online multiplayer can be an overwhelmingly large part of a game so I have decided to do a complete analysis of my 360 Game Library to have a clear understanding of the situation.
Is the Deathsmiles faceplate an omen of the console's dark fate?
To accomplish that goal, I went through every single one of my 196 games on the 360, including the digital downloads and categorize them into 2 groups: a) games that have online multiplayer functionalities and b) games that have strong single player elements that overshadow the online features or they don't have online functionalities whatsoever. The verdict: only 32 games have overwhelmingly dominant multiplayer elements and that is just roughly 16% of the total. These games include Gears of War I & II, the Halo series, and Resident Evil 5. This doesn't mean that the other 164 games have no online features - Mushihimesama Futari Ver 1.5 for example has a great online leaderboard but it is a vital core of the game? No, because I don't have to look at other people's high score to encourage me to perform better in the game. It is still a fact however than I am missing out on some of the online-related contents found in these 164 games - at least these omissions are not critical to the overall gaming experience.
In conclusion, the loss is not as devastating as I expected it to be but without LIVE Gold, I can only expect a significant decline in the number of games I will get for the system in the future. There are a couple of worries I do have in regards to keeping myself away from LIVE Gold. The first being a small number of good friends I have who only play on the 360: These individuals still have that power to persuade me to come back so that I could play online games with them again. The second being Gears of War III: The first two games have some of the best co-op I have ever played and I would hate to miss out on the co-op action of GoWIII. All of a sudden, the prospect of staying away from LIVE Gold is not as easy as it originally seemed to be but the fact of the matter is, only time will tell.
2 comments:
Such a bugger that we are on at different times. I'm still wanting a good old co-op games of Halo X :(
Yeah, it was unfortunate that we didn't get to do our Halo runs... Now, I don't even know if that will ever happen but thankfully you also game on the PC ^_^
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