There is some cause for concern for the solo-only player. Massively successful games like Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Valve's Left 4 Dead offered shorter campaign modes in favor of a more robust multiplayer feature set. And StarCraft fans may be more than perturbed about the late release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, already sliced into three campaigns, largely due to delays with Battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer service.

If more publishers and developers follow suit in shifting more focus to multiplayer, will the lone wolf suffer?

The addition of multiplayer to games that have relied on their single player strengths is done for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that the game buying public has simply come to expect it as a series sequelizes and evolves. It's an oft-demanded feature from the community, even in series that tend to be strictly single-player.

While Bethesda's epic role-playing games tend to be limited to solo adventures these days, the developer has flirted with multiplayer in the past, with Howard pointing to games like The Terminator: SkyNET. But he sees the tacking on of multiplayer as a potential distraction.