Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don't see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.
It's ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don't get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could've never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just... so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.
And this whole thing is just.. so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can't let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it's not something anyone is going to "fix". But I'm not hopping onto an endless treadmill that's never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.
37I relate to this so much.
36As an elder Millennial, I was in college when Halo and Counterstrike became things, and they were massively popular.
But sure, growing up I was playing fucking DOS games my cousin handed me on floppy disks, and then later games like King's Quest and Myst. Otherwise I was hanging with friends playing SNES and Genesis.
Also, all those 12 year olds kicking my ass online in Halo 3 in 2007 blatantly prove this person wrong
32PvP is when you put in the boxing cartridge and one of you is the white guy and the other is the black guy, but you do better because you know the controller you gave your friend doesn't like to go left.
(Yes, I'm old.)
21The fuck? I'm an elder millennial, and I was PvPing my entire life. First over serial cables, Doom 2, Dune 2, Warcraft 1/2, C&C/Red Alert, Heretic/Hexen off the top of my head.
Then internet gaming came along in middle school. Ultima Online, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, CS (HL2 mod), etc.
And that's just PC. Shit ton of local pvp on consoles from the start. Spy vs Spy on NES is the first console heads up pvp that I can remember.
I just don't play much PvP now because I'm old and don't have the energy or free time.
20The problem I have with pvp games is they are very shallow compared to single player games. Most pvp games also tend to be shooters which by definition are shallow in gameplay.
I usually get bored of the gameplay loops of pvp games long before I get tired of the pvp aspects themselves. Just take a look at counter strike, Valorant, Fortnite, etc. Not much variance in the gameplay loop. I get bored of that shit really quick.
On the other hand a single player game like rimworld, factorio, battle brothers…..Their gameplay loops are complex and still bring be varied interesting gameplay even 1000 hours later.
18I play video games to escape the world full of people I can't stand. Not to run back into them in a place where they no longer have any manners at all...
13As I got older, I started to find online toxicity less bothersome and more funny. I was playing The Finals yesterday and some dude was just going AT IT in the text chat (voice chat is always off, this is a must) and I was actually shocked to find myself insulting him right back. It was...fun. Am I part of the problem now?
12Dude I’m 53 and this is exactly me (so mid gen-x?). I’ve been playing video games since I was 8 (of course back then it was pong and an Atari 2600). I hate the toxicity of any online play.
11I'm also a younger millennial, but I think this is just somewhat attributed to having enough bad experiences with PVP games, and that's fine.
The fact you are playing against other sentient, strategizing, sometimes malicious, but sometimes naively innocent, unpredictable, biological machines is just something you can't really find in single player games.
There's all kinds of pitfalls where you either take things too seriously, too personally, or just meet a ton of assholes in too short a time. It's a bit like life itself. It's got the highest highs, and the lowest lows.
Single player games are simply a lot more consistent in avoiding the lows, but at the cost of never being able to reach those highest highs of knowing you did so well against actual human beings, opponents you can consider your peer or even smarter than you. No single player AI opponent can match that. They usually never play by the same rules as you do, or lack the same weaknesses you do.
But since we remember the lows much more vividly, everyone remembers PVP games as being miserable. Yet we keep playing, because deep down we're hoping to get that high again. I think it's fine to let people enjoy that. But it might not be for everyone.
11Interesting take. I’m Gen X, and when online play came about it was amazing after so many years of singleplayer games, or games that your opponent had to be physically present to play on another controller next to you. So to reject online play to me seems…odd.
That said, I think online and always-online have done a lot of damage to gaming, from DRM to loss of physical ownership to loss of good singleplayer storylines in triple-A games.
11I like PvP games when they are among smaller circles. It's easy to get good when the people you're playing against all live locally.
But then you get into something like Destiny 2, and some korean kid who gets paid to main the game absolutely obliterates you the moment you spawn.
World-wide matchmaking is a mistake. If PvP were locally-matched, I think plenty of people would have a good time.
10My biggest problem with PVP in most games is the fact that my play style of being not super sweaty works against me since I felt like I was always getting paired against better players and felt like I was never getting any better no matter how much I played. Not a millennial, but I definitely feel this. CPU are also my beef as well in most games as well.
10Same as an older zoomer
990s kid, and I grew up playing Counterstrike and the Warcraft/Starcraft series online. Multiplayer games tend to be the most fun when you've got a community of people around you to game with, and that's something high school / college provides in spades but adult life really finds lacking.
I'm mostly sad I was a bit too old to get into the Collaborative/Competitive game scene - that sweet mix of RTS and FPS you got from Tribes or the more heavily modded versions of Team Fortress or EVE Online, where you would build up a base's tech tree before launching a climactic battle against your opponent's main base.
Interacting with other humans and following the strategic "meta" to execute increasingly elaborate plays and strategies adds depth to relatively simple games. Whether I'm playing tennis or battling it out in the technodrome, there's something fun about the PvP experience that PvE can't replicate.
8the only PVP i need is CHESS
8I need to avoid competition for my mental health sake. It isn’t even fun I just can’t stand losing so any game that makes me lose will see me pouring countless hours to ‚win’ whatever that means.
It’s honestly like some kind of disability because once any small amount of competition is involved it ruins everything for me. Let’s say I enroll in drawing course. Someone there is better and now I can’t sleep because I need to win or something. It’s exhausting and like a prison of mind in a way.
It’s not that bad nowadays thankfully but like few years ago it was all such maddening race to who knows where instead of savouring the meaningful. Frankly it’s still the same but competition now is who is the wisest
7My interest is with the Hard mode AI and only the Hard mode AI. Outsider do not need to get involved.
6Chat and PvE games are nice.
6As an old fart I have enjoyed beating a computer many times. However, beating your friends is always nicer.
The entire latency problems and whatnot come when you are trying to beat strangers online; that has always held very little appeal to me
5It seems that the younger generation is actually learned something. Good lad.
4I don't care for pvp versus total strangers. Local pvp or co-op is where it's at. Same with LAN parties. My brother used to bring his PS3 over to my apartment in college. He'd hook up to the TV, I'd grab a PC monitor and headphones, and my roommate would bring his own TV to the living room and we'd play Borderlands 2 together. We used to also play a lot of Melee in those days. I miss that a lot.
4I like human competition. I have my doubts about human team mates, because some of them are total noobs. I can barely tolerate class based teams, and I hate playing medic with a passion, because no one appreciates the medic.
Where I personally draw the line is effing building shit in FPS games..Who the hell ever thought that up? I'm running around shooting people, I don't want to erect a freaking shed with a staircase in the middle of nowhere so I can freak out and hide in it like a scared rat.
Oh and skins and outfits. Nothing gives me more pleasure than constantly killing off every player with the fanciest outfit using the oldest, most default skin in the game. I'm sure you think you look super fancy in your banana suit with sunglasses that were undoubtedly bought by your freaking mom, now eat my rocket and die.
4I'm the opposite, as I got out of my teens I really started to get less and less out of single-player games. They just felt like an empty theme park for the most part. I found myself more drawn to games like DayZ where it's not just PVP, but it's entirely open for you and others to choose how you play and approach eachother.
That anarchy of play styles has produced some of the greatest experiences I've had in a game because the "characters" you meet are real people and you have to use real reasoning and human social skills to navigate situations, whether it's determining how suspicious someone is, making a hard call when you are uncertain, or forming alliances and building trust. I actually am the main character of my own story and what I bring to the table determines what sort of story I have.
Single-player games simply can't offer that. In a single-player you're just inhabiting a fictional character as their story progresses along rails like a train ride. I'd rather just watch a film or series for that kind of story.
And a game like Elden Ring where you just rotely try over and over until you find the scripted limits of the AI just doesn't do much for me, I never feel fully engaged or accomplished. But when I engage with a human stranger and either negotiate or outwit them (or get outwitted) that is really mentally stimulating for me because there's this overlap with reality where the human interactions are unsimulated.
3PVP is only fun when I'm good at it and that takes time. The last PVP game I was heavily into, it took me a year just to get decent. It wasn't until the third year when I felt like I was above average.
3And it needs to be executed flawlessly. Lost a unit? Tap dat undo fast!
[Dry haves in OCD]
3I just hate that you spend so much time looking at menus when you start a online match. They’ve added so much friction because you basically start in the store. And then you have to wait in the lobby. If you only have time to play one match you spend a third of your time not playing.
3After MW2 (the new one) I realized that I don't have fun anymore with online PvP with strangers. Back in the day on Black Ops 2 I did voice impressions and shenanigans. I remember on PSN I would cut up with strangers and they would just randomly add me. After the PS4 and Xbox One, everyone plays in their own parties and the only ones in voice chat are eating too loud, neglecting their children, playing shitty music, or are try hards about to blow a blood vessel.
most publishers PvP games are a live service now and want you to treat it like a second job and play nothing else or you get left behind. I'm not about that life anymore I guess.
2I don't identify with this at all. I'm barely gen x depending on where you draw the line, so even older, and I still love online play.
Also, I grew up playing all kinds of games against other people, just not online. Hell wasn't even the first video game something like pong?
I can see not being into it, or growing out of it, but not being into it because of the year you were born, if you're not older than me, makes no sense.
1The reason I don't play pvp anymore isn't because my interest in pvp has changed. It's because what modern pvp with its mtx/fomo is. I don't want to play dress up or roleplay. I don't want to have fidget spinner style idle animations. I don't want to walk across huge maps only to get sniped and have to wait 10 minutes for a respawn. I don't want edgy/try hard "character" dialog for the classes.
1Elder millennial who played Ultima Online with as little contact with other players as possible reporting in 🫡
1This person watched Reboot and took great offense at the computer winning. Bet he cheered when Bob and Enzo got stuck in the games.
1Meanwhile, I love PvP because people can learn and get better so there is always a challenge even after the single player game becomes boring because you know every single trick, trap, move and attack pattern.
If the Soulsborne games didn't have PvP, I probably would not have been as big of a fan of them as I currently am. Sekiro is one of my least favorite of them because it has no multiplayer at all and has just 1 build so there's not really a point to playing through it more than once to experience everything it has.
But I can understand how people who aren't that good at games would prefer the computer as their opponent.
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