Games traditionally feature both single player and multiplayer as separate entities. With the rise to prominence of PSN and Xbox Live, the two modes have been competing with each other. Underwhelming multiplayer in strong single player experiences and lacking single player gameplay in exciting multiplayer focused games were all too common in recent years.

At last year's E3, there was a clear tide shift in the game industry as the two modes began to harmonize. Destiny, The Division and Watch Dogs offered glimpses into games that acted like MMOs with players in huge connected worlds and raids, but all with the polish and mechanics of a top-tier AAA action game.

While The Division may not end up hitting until 2015, expect to see more and more games that are both announced and released featuring this melding of single player and multiplayer. It's another way to effectively make games "always-online." Do you think that this is the future of games development?

Titanfall is an example of this - the AI logic for the grunts and auto-titans doesn't run on your PC, it runs as a cloud application on Microsoft's Azure cloud service

That is great if you have a fast, stable internet connection. Not so great for those of us who don't.

Good point, it depends on the type of game.

If I take my laptop on vacation with me and want to play Panzer Corps or somesuch turn-based game at a leisurely pace WITHOUT signing on to steam, without logging in to some random Wi-Fi...

... also I'm not a big fan of games that RELY on a central server either for authentication or matchmaking. Update servers- fine. Not having to hunt down patches is a great feature, but forcing logon to play single player is annoying. The Wargame AirLand Battle games are an example of this.

1) I don't want other people in my games, because chances are a fair percent of them are going to be wankers

2) I don't care for statistics, best-of-class tables or any other way to compare myself with others playing the same game.

3) I don't deal with asking for permission to run a game I already bought for dear money, everytime I sit down to play it.

You got it right in the initial post that merging this is just another way to force authentication and "always-on".

In the end it's just another method to excert more control over the paying audience, more avenues to push DLC on them, more handcuffs connecting them to the ecosystem of the publisher.

I really don't know why consoles like MP so much when every game's MP dies in a month other than COD and Halo.
When they pulled the plug on Chromehounds, that game became useless since SP was basically all tutorial--and that was an amazing MP game, the best I've played.
Used to be there were a lot of long lived MP games, even Rainbow Six 3 and Black Arrow were huge on Live long after the 360 came out. Ghost Recon too.
Now...forget it. That's why I don't buy console games anymore. Well, that and the lack of imaginative games.

Good point. I have decided to limit my console game purchases because of this reason. Destiny is the only "must have" console title on my radar.

I haven't played offline offline for at least two years now. I used to like single player mode but the (still) tragic ai and lack of decent single player games makes it near impossible these days.