you know what, you partly took the words out of my mouth , back then technology was not as developer's really needed it to be , so in my opinion a lot of other game factors had to be implemented more pronounced than graphics and large worlds and all the fancyness we enjoy today , but it's also a balancing act these days , developers still need to sacrifice a bit of one thing to improve another thing , I have noticed this a lot , as soon as something in a game is pushed up like graphics , the rest of the game suffers from some scaled down version of ai or whatever , it seems we can never have it all .

but at least they still sell titles , but sometimes I am amazed at what is sold .

then there's always those games that just cannot crack it as anything other than just being mp , this is what I think I want to focus on , something completely do-able as mp only , if I ever can manage good ai I would definitely go sp too , the thing is just what people expect from sp is pretty hard to really serve them , but back to point , in my opinion theres a lot of things multiplayer games can get away with , like no need for ai no need for pathfinding no need for complicated story line development no need for hordes of enemies no need for cutscenes , and well non linear gameplay comes as a bonus , basically sp and mp is apples and oranges