What makes you prefer single-player over multiplayer, or vice versa?

Right now, the two games battling for supremacy atop my personal heap of video games I’m trying to play are Diablo 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3, while I’ve sort of taken a break from World of Warcraft for a while (although that gets harder every passing day). I play both BG3 and D4 as purely single player games. I don’t have to schedule my gaming around what other players are doing; I can just fire up the game and go until I haven’t got any more interest in playing or have to stop to do something else. There’s no gathering together of people, no need to find anyone else to run a dungeon or a quest — I can play when I want, as long as I want, and stop when I want.

That being said, there are things I miss about multiplayer gaming. I miss my guild and the friends I’ve made there. I miss running big raids I could never solo, or at least not until a couple of expansions go by. I miss tanking, strangely enough — there’s a kind of metagaming involved in making sure I can hold aggro and mitigate enough damage to keep on my feet. Games like WoW and even running D4 with a group scratch an itch that I don’t get from my more solitary gaming pursuits. And that has me thinking about how and when I choose to go single player over multiplayer.

Single player games are always going to be limited in ways based around the fact that they are scripted. The story is being related through a computer and no matter how powerful that computer is, there will always be limits to how many options and tactics will unfold in said games. But going full multiplayer in games like League of Legends or Overwatch 2 also means going PVP, and that’s something I simply can’t get from single player games. Sometimes, I want to play with other people, and sometimes I want to play against them.

So what about y’all? How are you currently finding yourself, are you feeling like a lone wolf or do you enjoy calling a pack of friends together to get your gaming fix?