Multiplayer In Wolfenstein II Would “Dilute” Story, Developer Says

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is set to launch in a few days and it is one of the increasingly scarce AAA titles without multiplayer. According to one of the developers, the reason for excluding the popular mode is that it would “dilute” the story of the single-player campaign. This is in direct contradiction to the recent trend that EA and other publishers are following, which is “more multiplayer and more microtransactions.”

In a world where major video game companies are increasingly obsessed with producing titles with multiplayer modes or only offer multiplayer, creating a game like Wolfenstein II is taking a huge risk. The game is a first-person shooter that is largely driven by its narrative and slick gameplay. In a recently published Gamescom interview with PC Gamer, the game’s lead designer Tommy Tordsson Björk said that adding multiplayer would have only gotten in the way of amazing storytelling.

"The only way we can create these super immersive narrative experiences is if we can solely focus on the single-player," Björk said. "Having a multiplayer component in this work process would just dilute it all. That's the danger if you try to do two things at once."

As PlayStation Lifestyle notes, the Wolfenstein developer is not the first to express how difficult it is to find a balance when creating multiplayer and single-player modes. Most gamers don’t realize the amount of work and creativity that go into developing both modes so that they feel natural, complete, and interesting.

The biggest concern that Björk and the rest of the game’s developers had with regards to adding multiplayer is the possibility of taking attention away from the amazing story. It is not unheard of for multiplayer to make the single-player campaign feel shallow and pointless due to how incompatible the two modes are. This is not to say that a game with multiplayer could not be amazing either.