I'm not sure why they think this is a younger millennial thing.

Im a millenial that wants to team up with friends to beat on the computer cause the computer hurt us all at one point.

The introduction of voice chat is when playing randos on the Internet stopped being fun

I much prefer co-op multiplayer to pvp and co-op in a game I’m interested in is rare.

So yeah mostly singleplayer.

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.

I relate to this so much.

I'm an older millennial and don't want to play online. I thought younger millennials liked playing online.

same bro.

i tried league of legends in 2012 and it was ass. i left and never looked back. every time i hear about people having a miserable time in league, i laugh, because i dodged a massive bullet.

As 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

I feel bad when I lose, and I feel bad when I make someone else lose, so pvp is just constantly feeling bad. There's no feeling of being good, just feeling bad.

I don't feel bad about winning against the computer.

PvP 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.)

The 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.

The 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.

Hard agree. Online pvp is and had always been a latency contest. A person's ability to aim where something was 300ms ago is not impressive.

i don't think I'm a younger millennial but I'm the same. always played videogames, just not mp.

I 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...

As 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?

Interesting 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.

Dude 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.

I mean Pong was also a PVP game...

I'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.

My 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.

I 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.

For me, playing against the computer inevitably results in me finding a repeatable way to beat it. If there is a story and varied environments, that is acceptable. However, for a real challenge, I’ll always go for human opponents.

Same as an older zoomer

I don’t get this.

I was playing PVP games in 1993. On the Internet.

I played my first offline video game in 1983.

Most video games I play today are offline on my phone, with a few PVP games in the browser on my computer.

What does being a millennial have to do with any of that?

the only PVP i need is CHESS

90s 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.