I feel the same way..
Unreal was awesome
Unreal 2 was Better
The tournament versions just annoyed me because I'm not a fan of death match at all and the single player Unreal 2 was incredible.
Unreal Tournament and Unreal are two totally different games.
Wait what are you listing games that are examples of? >.<
BF: Muiltiplayer with simple missions that offer the same gameplay as online but with bots and very simple story line explaining the maps mainly.
Quake 1-2: Both singleplayer campaigns with online play
Quake 3: Muitliplayer with simple singleplayer bot play
Quake 4: True to the old quake 1-2 style Single player campaign and muiltiplayer
UT: Muilti with simple missions, nothing differnt then online play.
CounterStrike: Online only
What I was saying, and I shold have elaborated was that most First person shooter (FPS) games that were designed for single player (SP) have been substandard for multiplayer (MP). The examples I previously used where supposed to be all FPS designed for MP action. Quake 1 & 2 well they might not have been soley MP as I never really played them, but Quake 4 was not designed for soley MP and had a great SP mode as I hear, and you can see what happened there to the MP side of things, its not a big as Quake 3's MP following.
BF-BF2 = MP
UT, as in Unreal Tournament not Unreal = MP
Quake 3 = MP
Counter strike = MP
Even thought some of these game you are able to play SP action, they are far more concentrated on MP modes. These MP games far surpass the SP designed games in many areas:
-Net coding
-game balancing,
-weapon balancing
-map design
-map balance
-game flow
-ability to run a competative environment without the need for a referee
-Some have the ability to duel
If you look at FarCry designed for SP for example, great SP game, but the MP in that is majorly flawed and in my opinion, compared with the likes of UT series, and BF series, sucked chocolate salty balls. In Farcry a player somtimes had to treck for minutes at a time to get back to the action after they die! There was also spawn killing iwhich was horrendously easy to do and happened quite alot which destroys a game, camping is way to easy...there was too many flaws too be taken seriously as a MP game.
To be fair, I would have to mention that the Halflife series was an exeption to this, as I think the MP coding was great, obviously had to be for Counterstrike to be such a popular game. But overall, if a game has a decent SP campaign, the MP usually is a ballsup.