All Square Enix Games are Going Online

[Mirage]

With the huge budgets S-E games have these days, the only way it'd significantly decrease the quality of the single player part would because of stupid design choices and resource management, not because there wasn't enough resources all in all.

I was considering time as a resource as well.

Wouldn't take much more time if they brought in a few programmers that wouldn't otherwise have worked on the game.

(and even more than that if it wasn't for uninformed people hating on it for no real reason)

I don't know if this was aimed at me specifically but I would like to point out all I was expressing is the fact that for a gamer of my tastes this has a lot larger potential drawback than benefit. No doubt for some it is a great boon. As always I will buy games individually based on if I think I will enjoy it or not.

Not specifically at you, but you'd be "part of the problem". Everyone who avoided a game because of "optional multiplayer" would be reducing the profit. If they didn't, the developers would earn more on the sales, which leads to a situation where we won't actually have to choose between "single player quality" (of course, this reduction in single player quality might not actually be big enough for anyone to notice even now) and "multiplayer features".

What if a certain multiplayer feature pushed so many extra games that it would more than make up for the cost of adding multiplayer? That would actually lead to the possibility of *more* resources being spent on the single player part.


White Knight Chronicles is also a poor example. It's a game whose main draw is multiplayer action (you shouldn't even be considering the game if you didn't plan on going online). The single player mode is more an introduction to the game, and a fall back option in case you can't find anyone online to play with.
In terms of multiplayer, FFvs13 (for example) would actually be the stark opposite of this. It'd be a mainly single player game, with multiplayer added as a bonus.

Everybody can win on this, don't be so goddamned pessimistic.