Getting back to the point: With cooperative gaming being so fun, how come it isn’t found in more games? Sure it’s always fun to frag your friends (especially if you get to hear/watch their reactions), but it’s also a lot of fun to kill hordes of zombies or roam other-worldly landscapes with your friends.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (image from IGN.com)
I believe I once heard a story of a press conference or presentation where the speaker asked the audience, “Who here liked [Elder Scrolls] Oblivion?” And a lot of people in the audience raised their hands. The speaker then asked, “Who here would like Oblivion if it had a cooperative mode?” And then everybody raised their hands.
That alone goes to show that there is clearly a demand for cooperative gameplay from the gamers. So why don’t developers implement this more? Understandably, there are many reasons for this.
Before I continue, I’d like to make it clear that as I discuss cooperative game modes, I mean game modes where players fight together against computer AI, not modes where players fight cooperatively against other players who are fighting cooperatively as well. The latter idea has been seen in many games already. Few have done it well, others not so much.
Gears of War 2 (image from IGN.com)
It’s relatively easy to build a single-player experience from the ground up, but then to add cooperative support later is very difficult as it was originally built for one person and not two or more. One of the main difficulties in this is making sure that enemy AI will react properly to having multiple players. Another obstacle is making sure that in-game scripted events aren’t affected by having multiple players present either. Then with consoles a big hurdle is making sure that one console will allow two or more players to play at the same time without the game slowing down too much. This could be solved though by forcing people to play cooperatively online or via system link and have only one person per console. While this may not be ideal, I personally believe this is better than having no cooperative gameplay at all. Net code could also prove to be an obstacle as there is a lot of data that has to be processed and sent to all of the players involved. However, it would seem that the level of sophistication that technology has reached today, I honestly would not believe it to be as big of an obstacle as it once was. Overall, it seems that creating a cooperative gameplay experience can be rather difficult and may add more time to an already long development process for games.
But then it begs the question: Why not just make the game with cooperative gameplay in mind from the beginning? Rather than implement cooperative modes as an afterthought, just build the game around the idea of including a cooperative mode. Easier said than done, I’m sure. The Rainbow Six: Vegas games are an excellent example of games which have excellent support for cooperative play and are also brilliant games to play alone and with others. They include the usual multiplayer modes such as deathmatch and team deathmatch, but the cooperative modes offer a different experience from the more “traditional” multiplayer modes that gamers are used to. There are plenty of other games that get cooperative gameplay right such as Gears of War (1 and 2), the Halo series, and Left 4 Dead to name a few.
Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (image from IGN.com)
Speaking of Left 4 Dead, that is a game that was clearly designed with cooperative play in mind from the beginning, and look at the results! It’s an excellent game. I’ve personally played this game for several hours. It includes only four campaigns and I’ve played each one several times and it still hasn’t gotten old. L4D has a “director AI” that changes the gameplay a bit in that it decides where items/ammo spawn and when players may get attacked by special infected as well as hordes of zombies, but after playing so much, it can still be somewhat predictable. Regardless of being able to predict or expect when things may happen, the cooperative gameplay in Left 4 Dead just hasn’t gotten old, the fun hasn’t worn out yet.
This brings me to my next point of cooperative gaming. It takes much longer to get old than competitive gameplay. I used to play Counter-Strike for hours on end when I first started playing it back in 2000 when it was still at Beta 6. Competitive play was fun then, and the only thing that kept it going for me was the updates of new content and the fact that I actually got very good at the game helped too. However, Counter-Strike began to settle into something with no new weapons and not many new maps and finally settled at version 1.6. I just wasn’t that interested anymore and had been steadily losing interest for a while before that (CS 1.3 was the best for me). I was looking for something new to play. I wanted a different experience. Playing in any CS server felt the same because no matter who I played with, the gameplay felt exactly the same.
With cooperative gameplay however, I feel that the experience always proves to be at least somewhat different no matter how much you play. For the time I’ve played Left 4 Dead and the numerous times I’ve played each of the four campaigns, I still run into players who play the game differently. The same argument could be made for competitive gameplay too, however I feel cooperative games are different because it encourages people to work together. No matter how much competitive games try to say that objectives are to be completed with teamwork, I personally believe that it rarely, if ever happens in public servers. With cooperative gameplay though, the players do work together, and it leads to a greater sense of accomplishment, and there isn’t usually a superhuman character around that does everything by themselves. This means that in cooperative games, it lets everybody playing feel like they were a part of something. In competitive games, it was all too easy to be overshadowed by the better players on your team. I know this, because there were times in Counter-Strike where I’d be doing absolutely terribly, but a couple of the top people on my team would clean out the other team and leave me with nothing to do. Those were some of the most boring times I had with Counter-Strike. In a cooperative game, if it is designed properly, everybody playing will have something to do.
While the Halo series and the Gears of War series may allow for 'superhuman' players to essentially do everything on their own, they still offer a lot of targets to shoot at. This makes it so that everybody playing can feel like they are helping each other out to complete their objective.
A beta screenshot of Left 4 Dead (image from Shacknews)
Left 4 Dead has been especially good at keeping everyone involved though because it is just about impossible to complete any level of that game while running solo. Being hit by any zombie slows you down, so you need other players to save you or else you’ll be attacked and killed. Special infected in particular will require one to be saved or protected by other players as well. Then teamwork is also required to fend off the hordes of zombies that will attack the players throughout each campaign. Left 4 Dead does a good job of forcing players to stick together and I believe that other games in the future looking to implement cooperative gameplay could learn a thing or two from it because it does such a good job of keeping all of the players involved, everybody is important.
So this leads me to my main point about cooperative gaming: it’s so fun because it tends to not allow really good players overshadow the less-experienced players. It gets everybody playing involved; it makes them feel like they’re all a part of something, fighting against a common enemy, and that they must rely on each other in order to accomplish their goals. It’s fun because you can be really good at the game or perhaps even bad at the game, but no matter what your skill level is, you can count on being part of the team without being forgotten after the all-stars have shot up every moving thing in the area.
Playing games with other people doesn’t always have to be about destroying your opponent (although Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. do a great job of making this fun). Working with other players can be just as fun, if not more fun. As long as it’s done properly and not tacked on to a game as some afterthought, cooperative gameplay should be a valuable addition to almost any game that will not only make it appeal to more people, but also increase its replay value. Gamers like myself love cooperative gameplay and sometimes it can be the deciding factor when figuring out whether I want to buy a game or not. I know that I can’t be the only person out there who values cooperative gameplay so much. It seems to me that investing in implementing cooperative gameplay would yield enough in returns such that it’d be well worth the investment in the end. So come on developers! How come we aren’t seeing cooperative gameplay more in games?
-G&G Allen
P.S.
I'm not saying that cooperative gaming is the ultimate in multiplayer gaming experiences, because I certainly love competitive multiplayer games from time to time, but I just wish developers implemented cooperative gaming modes more often.
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