It was 3, I have it in my room looking pretty right now.

There does seem to be a lot of multiplayer only games released recently. I see a new fps on Steam check out the game page and nope no single player. It's as if an individual or small company have decided to make a game and the quickest and cheapest one is an mmo using the Source or Unreal engine.

What in the past would have been a free mod is now sold as an mmo game that is popular when it comes out but is almost dead in a years time. If anyone remembers Gunman Chronicles, a mod of Half-Life that was developed into a full single player game with a good story, then that is how it should be done imo. If it was released today they'd be no single player mode and it's just be a few maps with Deathmatch and Capture the Flag gameplay.

There's some isolated examples of good mmo games like Mount and Blade where a full single player game exists but usually my favourite part of a game is neglected: the story. I get bored of different games that are more like maps for a single game which is why I like GoG. I can escape from the unoriginal new releases and play a classic while I wait for the relatively few new classics.

Well, the engine isn't the important bit. The thing is, a good singleplayer experience takes a lot of time and effort to design, because everything that happens to the player has to be provided by the developer. AI programming is difficult and time consuming. With a multiplayer game however, no AI programming needs to be done, no event triggers need to be made, just the basic game mechanics and the levels. Then the players themselves provide everything else. Note that I'm talking primarily about PvP multiplayer games. MMORPGs usually need to incorporate non-player enemies and loads of event triggers as well, so not much is saved with those.

A bunch of my friends (from another on-line community), most unfortunately, which is an extremely tempting situation. But I, just like you, feel bad about spending a vast amount of money on such a game, knowing that I'd no longer find people to play it in a few month. If the game would 'only' take subscription and no head up payment, I'd have been in and then just forget about it.