On the other hand, competitive multiplayer (which I have no use for whatsoever, except for Team Fortress 2, because…damnit, it’s just that good), that’s considered part and parcel of the package and if you don’t have it, in most genres, you get dinged for the lack. So, meh. Start bitching about cooperative play when it’s expected by default in that way.

A couple of other things – sure, Guild Wars players “skipskipskip” bullshit is annoying, much like the “gogogogogogogo” freaks on Battle.net, but when your playerbase is apparently possessed of seven varieties of ADHD all at once, that’s how it goes. At least Guild Wars only skips cutscenes if everyone votes for it. And you can (I am) play through them solo, in which case there’s no problem.

And story doesn’t work very well in any persistent multiplayer space regardless of which end of the multiplayer experience it’s focused on. It’s really hard to provide a decent, immersive narrative when all the components have to continue to exist for the next player(s). It’s not a problem that’s made any different by cooperative play.

report

The reason that many modern games go the “Solo is Co-op minus one player” route is that it’s the best way to make sure the investment in co-op is actually worthwhile. I have only a few direct experiences to cite but I’m guessing that usually it’s way tougher to graft co-op onto a single player design than vice versa.

The question every game should ask itself is if the co-op really is worth all the pain and suffering and yes, fraying of focus from the solo campaign. There’s a line of reasoning among developers that goes something like “multiplayer sells games / extends their lifespan”, “co-op is easier to get people into than DM as you’re not getting your ass handed to you for the first 10 hours of play”, “co-op leverages most of the solo play assets and design”, “let’s do co-op”.

All of which is reasonable, but you really have to weigh the value of that checkbox versus its impact on everything else. With Gears I’d argue it was well worth it, they planned it from the start (well, after the countless reboots eg “Unreal Warfare”, “Cogs of War” etc) and the co-op really did kind of transform the experience for the better.

Haven’t played Kane & Lynch and the rest of the recent “plague” of co-op games though, so I can easily believe we are witnessing the concept’s shark-jump.

report

Lu-Tze: I agree, having the player character be the only character in the “party” that dies is a poor show. I think more developers should look towards Republic Commando as a method of fixing that, where you can either order your team mates to revive you or to finish the fight and then come get you. This also syncs in nicely with Co-op play, where this is what tends to happen (though in some cases, the dead player has to wait until the living is in a safer area before being spawned back in – Halo 3 and R6:Vegas spring to mind).

report

That said you’ve probably seen them all by now anyway.

Anyway, co op is my favourite multiplayer mode, or at the very least team vs team, I can’t abide deathmatch anymore, I just find it so dull and have done since the days of quake 2.

report

Guild Wars, OTOH, does point out the difficulty of trying to bring SP conventions (like narrative cutscenes) to a MP-centric RPG. The old Infinity Engine RPGs had similar problems, IIRC: e.g., dialogs halting play for everyone, having to gather your party to move to the next area.

report

Make fun of Romero all you want, except:
1.) the man gave us the majority of Knee Deep in the Dead, which still plays better than most FPS level sets today, and
2.) he was actually ahead of the curve with Daikatana’s sidekick characters.
Mikiko and Superfly ate up a lot of development time and were generally pretty one dimensional, but that game’s model–single player with supporting character(s) that transitions well to co-op mode–really pointed the way forward.

What I mean is that the increased emphasis on co-op has gone hand in hand with the small but significant ante that’s been upped as regards to storytelling/gameplay conventions. Across the board in the big action titles–Halo 3, HL2+Episodes, Gears of War–you’re no longer quite the traditional one man army of old, you’re generally at least an Army of Two (this paragraph sponsored by EA).
No, really–even eschewing the traditional silent protagonist, you still need to reliably have at least one other character around fairly consistently in order to build anything of a story. Master Chief gets that alien fellow, Marcus has Dom, Gordon has Alyx/Barney, Kane has Lynch. The big titles have at least someone around a good part of the time so that we see the hero in context, that we might begin to deliver story in our medium, not just dumb aping of film conventions, big black letterboxing closing in over the scene.

One of the stumbling blocks for getting co-op into an otherwise traditional SP experience is thereby removed–dealing with two or more heroes instead of one. Instead of weirdly cloning out the hero, building the game such that the second player takes over for one of the supporting characters we’re getting used to having around (and who are already in the cutscenes) makes good sense. And it helps bolster the small, but significant gains we’ve made in storytelling by making sure those supporting characters are in place, not just cop-out generic NPCs.

HL2 spoiled us on this–we want Barney, the character, not Barney the generic security guard clone that we only hang out with for five minutes at a time and then leave because he can’t climb ladders. Valve shrewdly noted the considerable attachment players built up for even primitive friendly NPCs in Half-Life, and they went forward from there. And while the HL2 arc doesn’t include any co-op, I’d argue their work is foundational to the current popularity of co-operative play.

So I’m going to have to go with the opposite take on this. Co-op doesn’t take away from the quality of our fine single player games, it enhances them. By building them so that it always makes sense for that supporting character to be around for the demands of co-op, the immersion and consistency of the single player game’s portrayal of a hero-in-context, even the single player version of the game is that much better.
There’s still a valid criticism about divided resources and certain compromises relative to building a “pure” single player experience versus a co-op game, but done properly such elements are synergistic, not subtractive.

report

Halo was rarely for playing single player in my house. My biggest wish after the release of original Halo was for some 8-player co-op missions for it, for instance.

report

Then designers need to accommodate the idiots.

Or, to put it a better way: most of the people I dungeon with in WoW are a few nails short of a coffin. It’s impractical to suggest that you can find four other like-minded people that wish to watch cut-scenes or delve into the narrative of the dungeon you’re questing in.

report

If a developer is shoehorning co-op in at the last minute, at the expense of another area of development then shoot the fucker and be done with it.

report

A game can’t have two masters.

That’s a dangerous statement. When I partake in a Company of Heroes skirmish, the players are equal partners in the game — no one man is greater — and the conclusion of the game is irrelevant, since the enjoyment is in the playing (unlike the Halo example).

The problems you discuss with MMORPG’s are largely due to the culture and risk-reward nature of the games. When I play Rainbox Six with a chum we’re not rushing to grab the best submachine gun the goons drop, and we’re enjoying the narrative as equal partners in the experience. The brotherhood and partnership is more reward than being the lone victor against the odds.

But yeah, co-op for the sake of co-op is bad.

Having said all of that, you have the “Devil’s Advocate” get-out clause so I don’t expect you to approach any of this.

report

Also, you appear to need to find better friends if they’re all bugging you to skip cutscenes in Guild Wars. Afterall, I think it’s a bit unfair to blame co-op games if you can only find idiots to play them with.

report

The “revive a dead team-mate” balance never works between Co-Op and Single Player. It either makes the game too easy in Co-Op mode, or too hard in the other.

Increasingly we are going to see games fulfil a niche market. An FPS seems to have to provide a compelling Single Player Storyline, which can be played through Co-Op, and online with Deathmatch and Team Based Objective game modes.

Look at the recent titles that have focused on one aspect of that. Team Fortress 2. Bioshock. Arguably some of the greatest games of the year. Way back when the UT vs Q3 war broke out, it was because they both aimed at the same niche market by limiting themselves to online play.

No-one complains that TF2 forces them to play online in a team, and if a game outright says “I am meant to be played Co-Op, this is what I am” then we shouldn’t deride it for not catering to gamer who prefers a story driven solo experience.

report