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Why Co-Op Makes all the Difference
When videogame historians look back at the year 2008, two developments will immediately stand out.
The first is that it’s been a banner year for downloadable console games. Whether it was the PlayStation Network (Echochrome, PixelJunk Eden and The Last Guy), Xbox Live Arcade (Braid and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2) or WiiWare (LostWinds and World of Goo), the online stores for each of the three major platforms served up bite-sized titles that were pound for pound as entertaining and engrossing as their full-sized counterparts.
Sure, it’s been another stellar year for disc-based games; the preceding 12 months have produced, as I write, such highly rated games as Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet and Gears of War 2. And, yes, there is a lingering bias by some, when summing up the year in videogames, to gloss over short-session titles. Nevertheless, I fully expect two or more of the aforementioned small games to make it on to the various and sundry Top Ten lists for 2008.
If the May-through-October time period was enough to make 2008 The Year of Downloadable Games, a two-week period in November saw the release of three titles – Resistance 2, Gears Of War 2 and Left 4 Dead – that comprise the second and arguably more interesting development: the breakthroughs that game creators have made with co-op play that goes beyond adding support for more players to the story mode.
Each studio went its own way. Insomniac built a separate co-op campaign for up to eight players, modelled after raids in massively multiplayer online games. Epic not only lets you play the main campaign with one other friend, but also created a new mode called Horde, in which as many as five players take on wave after wave of Locust enemies on the same maps used in Gears Of War 2’s multiplayer mode. Valve, for its part, pits up to four players against massive, relentless and fast-moving packs of zombies, hounding gamers into eschewing lone-wolf tactics for the wisdom of teamwork whether it’s in the singleplayer/co-op campaign or in the versus mode where four player-controlled humans face off against four player-controlled infected bosses.
Insomniac’s approach is at once the most intriguing and the least fully fleshed out, mainly because it appears to have been designed with just a single strategy for success: soldiers out front, spec ops in the middle, and medics bringing up the rear. Whether the enemy AI or the encounter design is to blame I can’t be sure, but if Insomniac can find a way to mix things up more it has the template for something both unique and special in the world of consoles.
Epic’s spin on co-op, by contrast, is completely straightforward – and that’s precisely why it’s so enthralling. By marrying play mechanics (run, take cover, active reload) and AI behaviours that have been buffed to perfection over two games against the brilliant simplicity of two to five players trying to defeat each new set of enemies as it spawns, Horde achieves the arcadey perfection that The Club never quite managed.
And while Left 4 Dead’s battles may seem as chaotic as those in Resistance 2, they aren’t. That’s because Valve’s much-touted AI director technology – aided and abetted by a terrific score and sound design – paces the encounters masterfully against the backdrop of levels that have been carefully constructed for both navigation and confrontation.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with giving players the ability to play a game’s campaign mode with their friends. In fact I approve wholeheartedly. Co-op serves as a motivator for me to start and finish games that I might not have completed in a timely fashion were it not for teaming up with a friend. It adds a social element, whether it’s planning strategy with my teammate or simply commiserating over having to retry a boss battle for the umpteenth time.
And despite what I may have said last month about why developers should reconsider how they approach a game’s difficulty, one of the side benefits of a co-op campaign is that it allows me to play a game’s story mode on a higher difficulty setting than I would have otherwise; that’s how I wound up finishing Halo 3 on Heroic and even tackling several of the levels on Legendary. I get to experience the enemies at their toughest with the help of my comrades, rather than being beaten into submission over and over again.
Challenge without undue amounts of failure – what’s not to like? But as much as enjoy a co-op campaign, I can’t help but feel as though co-op gameplay brings with it a set of possibilities that are worthy of more exploration, untethered by the dictates of a story that has been authored for a single player – or untethered from story entirely. And for two weeks in November, three of the industry’s best developers pointed their peers in that direction. Kudos.
Yes, put it in the books, the implementation of co-op in games is a 2008 original! Kidding aside, I see where Croal is going. He's noticing a trend in a specific genre which is fine, but this certainly is not some kind of historic event in the industry. I agree with him on downloadable games, though. I think they're really coming into their own.
As for Dead Space compared to L4D, well, I think they're fundamentally different games. They both offer a different kind of value. I don't look at L4D as a visceral, horror-themed game. It's all about the co-op in that one. Dead Space is strictly a single player experience, from the ground up. The way the story is presented, the super high production value, etc. They're both very different and I don't think either kind of game is going away.
I'm hoping for a online coop version of Zelda: Four Swords, or something similar.
All those new Co-Op modes strike me as refinements which were long overdue. After all, which console or computer supported only one controller? Only the Mouse + Keyboard PC.
Back on the SNES there were co-op games such as Secret of Mana, even the old Amiga version of 'The Settlers' supported two mice, meaning two player could manage the same kingdom cooperatively. The original Lemmings supported two mice. The PC was connected from the start, so from Doom to Serious Sam, co-op was a feature; split screen or multiple mice was not. Playing an MMO means also playing a game geared towards co-op. While the game might advertise its massive numbers, most of the game happens in small groups of 2-8 players.
But for the first time, big release shooters get randomly spawning enemies (L4D), or randomized levels (Resistance), both techniques used as far back as 1997 in the original Diablo. Level and asset creation is back in the center of attention. Sure, Unreal Tournament XY, id software and Valve games had level creators attached, but with the added ease of use of Spore and Little Big Planet, those features get recognized again - now they impact the final verdict positively, instead of being a side note.
An industry obsessed with fear mongering all day about used sales of games is rediscovering something. If publishers want to prevent a circle of friends from buying a game only once and then lending it to each other, publishers need to add a value to the title that comes from friends owning multiple copies. That separates Dead Space from L4D. Guess which game all my friends bought so we play together and which game makes the round.
The real innovation of 2008 might not be based on technological advances, because all those technical innovations were there at least 10, if not 20, years ago. The paradigm of 2008 is how publishers invest time into these old innovations again, so more people buy their game at release. From the day they started complaining about Gamestop, it simply took one development cycle to get to this point.