Posted November 16, 2017
Trilarion: Not sure what you expected. This is pretty much decent standard human behavior, not restricted to gamers in any way. People never chill and wait with their judgement until events actually happened. They always like to speculate, jump to conclusions and suspect the worst (or best). This won't change and expecting more patience is maybe asking for too much. And the game industry including CDP knows of this behavior and still cannot find different words announcing upcoming features? Really? They basically ask for an overreaction.
I don't really expect anything to be honest. People are free to do whatever they want, including freak out about completely hypothetical features of a game that's apparently not even close to coming out. By the same token, I'm free to laugh at their freaking out, because it seems a major overreaction to me. And I think gaming companies being awful at PR, even the big ones, is not exactly a new thing. Their major problem is that they're kind of caught between saying stuff that pleases their investors and marketing suits, and stuff that pleases their customers, the problem being that those two groups want very different things. They're also often goaded into saying thoughtless stuff by gaming "journalists" so the interviews make for better clickbait imo.
Trilarion: On the other hand my impression is that the middle ground is pretty thin. Either you have a multiplayer part in your game or you haven't, and if you have you need some sort of authentication for the multiplayer users which will of course also check if you own the copy, so DRM is a must then. And I hardly know any game that combines the best of single and multiplayer. They always concentrate on either one or the other, and the other part is then mostly boring. It could be different this time, but would require a major miracle. Also CDP does not publish so many titles per year. One more multiplayer game probably means one less single player game from them. Maybe that's too simple. Maybe they deliver a great single player game with some kind of optional (I don't care much about) multiplayer part. It's possible. Yet, I find it somehow a bit hard to believe. We'll see.
I don't know about that. They could easily pull something like Neverwinter Nights, where the singleplayer story is completely independent of the multiplayer component, and the only DRM is a key to unlock multiplayer. Of course, that's probably a best case scenario and it's entirely possible they'll end up doing something way worse (from the point of view of gamers who hate DRM and care more about singleplayer games, anyway), but there's no reason to panic just yet, imo.