Coop Mechanics 1
Cooperative play is the new big thing in games. It’s actually more surprising that it has taking this long to get here then it is that most games incorporate coop today. Playing with friends have always been more engaging then playing against the game itself, which means multiplayer is more fun then single player. But the old standard of multiplayer pitted players against each other which led to high levels of stress and performance anxiety in play. Which is not very enjoyable for most people. Hence, cooperative play was an implicit must have long before it became the norm.
Cooperative play in games today tend to be very simple by design, mostly games tend to copy the single player mechanics creating another player and then upping the difficulty level. This makes for pretty shallow cooperation but can indeed be fun (ex: Gears of War).
To emphasize cooperation some games add elements that constrain the players from advancing without cooperation (pressing two buttons at the same time to open a door) but this is still quite shallow cooperation.
Some games further along the coop spectrum have more coop interaction to make the experience more engaging but with varying degrees of success. For instance Little Big Planet is a fantastic cooperative game play experience when two player play. When three or four players play the game comes across as limiting as the players will need to progress at the same pace to cooperate but can simply run ahead to leave one or more players ahead. This closely resembles the hierarchies we can find in schools, the better players are picking at the less proficient players to show off their skill.
I think a better way of implementing cooperation might be as is announced by developer Phenomic in their upcoming RTS game Battle Forge where players team up to achieve different objectives at the same time. Winning or loosing an objective affect the difficulty curve of the other players objectives. But I guess it’s easy to call this type of gameplay parallel rather then cooperative.
Cooperation might be hard to achieve as true cooperation is not even that usual in real life. When do we ever work at the same things at the same time? Perhaps we should abandon the search for cooperative play and focus our efforts on creating parallel play instead.
As Jesper says cooperation in games is something would have to happen sooner or later, since the human race is a very social driven society. We are pack animals and our strength is our brain capability which some hundred thousand years ago calculated that cooperation and coordination between several beings is helpful in many scenarios.
There for it was only a matter of time before we cooperation was brought in as a core game mechanic in games.
I agree with Jesper that many games uses a crude and simple implementation to create a game mechanic that can be called cooperation. Just looking back in game development history most games were created as singleplayer oriented games. One of the big reasons for this was that not a lot of people had internet connections at home, or did not have a good enough internet connection to be able to support at multiplayer game. In those cases where game developers wanted to create a coop or player vs player game mode that could be played from home (without a internet connection) they focused on creating split screen modes. With modern day hardware technology and the breaktrough in use of internet for gaming purposes many of the old bottle necks are gone.
But game developers have other issues today. Not a long time ago games focused on singleplayer and could have the bonus of online multiplayer. Today most publishers believe that a multiplayer mode in a game is a must. This causes stress to the developer, since to be honest: Developing a game with good a singleplayer mode and a good multiplayer mode, is like developing 2 different games. Call of Duty 4, as an example, had 2 different development teams (one for SP, and the other for MP) from day one of the projects. Developing AAA games today require alot of man power, which in turn is very expensive. Many develpers can’t afford this and must choose to focus on one mode of the game. Usually this is the SP mode (which is alot easier to develop compared to MP). So they try to keep it simple, and what is more simple than to take the SP campaign and add the option of one more player. This is indeed a crude and simple way of creating multiplayer and/or cooperation in a game, but many developers can’t afford to make it any more complex.
chimaeraswe - January 10, 2009 at 10:49 am |