I can understand why people want this game to have some form of multiplayer capability. On the other hand, I would like the planned three acts to concentrate exclusively on single player. Why is that so?
The same reason I like to read my books myself, and not with my friends around me, reading the same book out loud. (This metaphor would probably be better with actually writing the book, as the story goes on in the game.) It would wreck the immersion, it would kick my story, my world, my little bubble in the groins. Skyrim just came into my mind: I’m not really into RPG-s, but I like and played a lot that game, because it felt like a whole story, where everything has it’s place, everything stands together as a coherent, monolith structure. Now look at ESO… gah. When everyone is a hero, no one is. It’s hard to tell a story, when there are strangers strolling around, killing randomly spawning stuff, being a dick and/or generally doing the same exact thing than you do. I’m not saying it’s not fun - it’s just not the fun I seek. There was, are and will be great games with multiplayer (for example, I hate the whole zombie survival thing, yet I play a tons of Unturned with my friends as it is hilarious and engaging, or Minecraft could be another fine example, though it is pretty nice in either SP or MP, with different focus points - and naturally, a million other, very different games up until Pong), but I do not want KCD simply to be a game. I want it to be a story, to be a world, to be a time machine with its own coherent rules which I can dwell into after a hard days night without having to regard what other people are screwing around with.
With that said, personally I only ever liked one MMORPG, and that is World War II Online. It doesn’t bother with storytelling, cool items, grinding, classical guilds, character stealing and all that “fun” stuff, it just does what I would like to have when I think about “massive multiplayer game”: hundreds of kilometers of moving frontlines with people on those massacring each other, and period, no bullshit. There is hard to break immersion when the whole game is about war and nothing else, and that is exactly what is happening on screen. This works. KCD’s current state and goals transplanted into a multiplayer game? Not so much I imagine. It would be being pregnant and not pregnant at the same time.
Still, I hope that one day a (or more than one) fine and accurate medieval-ish MMORPG comes out, hell, maybe even I will like it - but first of all, all I want is a nice “book”, something what I can “sit down under a tree with” - and so far KCD seems to do give me that. Give the people MMORPG-s! …but not from the budget of this particular game.
Lastly, about the “simple” multiplayer: Naah. Warband, Chivalry, War of the Roses… in those terms KCD would be just yet another “sword fighting game”, and - god forbid - maybe not even the best. Been there, done that.
