The Joy Of Co-Op
This article was published last year in PC Gamer UK. It's my ode to co-op gaming, and it features quotes from Epic's Clifford Bleszinski and the excellent Harvey 'Witchboy' Smith. (Shame about that Blacksite game, eh?) I've revised it slightly for 2008.
It's our favourite abbreviation: co-op. We're not simply talking about your basic multiplayer here, [...]
This article was published last year in PC Gamer UK. It's my ode to co-op gaming, and it features quotes from Epic's Clifford Bleszinski and the excellent Harvey 'Witchboy' Smith. (Shame about that Blacksite game, eh?) I've revised it slightly for 2008.
It's our favourite abbreviation: co-op. We're not simply talking about your basic multiplayer here, and nor are singing odes to teamplay in Counter-Strike or World Of Warcraft. We're talking co-operation. A couple of gamers versus the game. That is where some the very best gaming moments lie.
I agree making co-op is a design challenge, but I've seen games with a local or LAN co-op and online multiplayer, but no online co-op. What the hell is with that? They've got the netcode, they've got the co-op code, why can't they combine them?
Coops rules. For me, by far the best coop games so far are still OFP/ArmA. They are sandbox enough that you can enjoy them as much playing alone as you can with 8 or more people on the same map, without it becoming smultiplayer (hey, new phrase!): playing a multiplayer game alone (like levelling in WoW).
deject wrote:I agree making co-op is a design challenge, but I've seen games with a local or LAN co-op and online multiplayer, but no online co-op. What the hell is with that? They've got the netcode, they've got the co-op code, why can't they combine them?
Probably because their sloppy netcode would cause horrendous lag on anything less than a LAN connection.
I enjoy co-op games, especially ones I'm not very good at. I get on with RTS games better as a co-op multiplayer than I do versus other players, although I generally still end up way behind. Left4Dead is looking like it has some good co-op potential.
What we're missing is something big, with decent co-op. Swot and Jops were quite good fun but both games are quite old and lacked polish even when they were new.
RTS games have been better at supporting this feature than FPS games, partly because in tactical games it's very tricky setting up enjoyable games with players of even slightly differing ability levels, whereas teaming up to cream the CPU is somehow more satisfying in a strategy game than it is an action one. Soup Cum was a good example, but could lag horribly if someone's connection was a bit below par.
Recent big names like Gears of War and Army of Two act like they have invented the co-op genre, but both feel rather unwieldy - though that may be because of my relative ineptness at FPS games with console controllers.
What deject said about the netcode makes sense - if they can do an online team vs. team mode, that's no different to a team vs. CPU option when the CPU side has the same number of players - I guess it only falls down if their netcode cannot handle a team vs. many CPU players, which is after all the more enjoyable scenario.
I don't think there should be any excuses on the technical side, after all we have been multiplayer gaming with 32 or so players since the Doom/Quake era and those games were designed to be playable over modems and MMOs have shown that vast numbers of players in the same world are possible. Only a few numbers, such as an arbitrary point indicating each item's location, its direction, direction of view (for players) its current model and frame of animation need be sent over the network - the local clients work the rest out and render it. Networks are faster now and having lots of destructible, carryable or drivable objects in an arena generates no less network traffic than NPCs.
I guess the only excuses are that bots have a bad name for being stupid (see Army of Two) although it could be argued that real people will always trump any bot in that department (see The Ship), or perhaps that playtesters didn't enjoy proposed co-op modes and they were dropped or not worked on - in which case I would put forward that they need different playtesters.
GTA IV has come the closest, with a nice variety of online modes, a couple of which are co-op, but lets itself down with no local (split screen) or LAN play, plus you can't run the excellent sandbox mode unless you are networked. However, it should be a lot of fun when the PC version inevitably appears.
The Joy Of Co-Op
is true.
at left4dead!
