Co-op Gaming: Methods To The Madness

Co-op is one of the best features currently being used in gaming. There is no better feeling than running around with a buddy and relying on each other to beat a level or a boss. This generation of consoles has seen the most co-op games since the SNES. Some of these games have come close to nailing what a co-op experience should be, while others serve as examples of why a game’s integrity shouldn’t be sacrificed just to be able to have co-op listed as a feature on the back of the box.

Old School…

I’ve noticed two methods that are usually used for handling co-op in a game. Neither is better than the other when the developer does it right. Good examples of these methods are Army of Two and Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo was the first game that really sold me on a co-op experience. I played through it with my cousin the first day I got my Xbox and immediately started looking for other games that could offer the same experience. In the days of the SNES, co-op games weren’t a rare thing. A lot of arcade games got ported to that console and included co-op options.

Games like Joe & Mac and Battletoads were my first introduction to co-op gaming at home, but even then the best co-op games were just arcade ports. Prior to the release of Halo, I can’t think of any good console co-op game that wasn’t an arcade port. Halo’s co-op was interesting because it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Other than the intro cutscene that shows two master chiefs coming out of the cryo chambers instead of one, the game is no different. The second player is never acknowledged by anyone in the game and they don’t appear in any of the cutscenes. The question is; does that matter? Did that hurt the story? The answer to both of those questions is no. It made the game much more fun to play with someone else and that’s all that mattered. I enjoyed the Halo trilogy, but to this day I can’t get through one of the games on my own. I think the games are just too boring without a second person.

New School…

The other method of co-op is the Army of Two method. In Army of Two, the entire game, its mechanics, and its story are all built around the fact that there is always someone playing with you. Personally, I think this is the most difficult for developers to master of the two methods because the dependence on another person or the A.I. can lead to game breaking frustrations. I enjoyed Army of Two when I played it with a friend, but the single player was atrocious. The fact is A.I. is not at the point that a game’s most basic features can be completely dependant on it. Gears of War 1 and 2 are similar in that the A.I. just isn’t up to snuff when it comes to playing as a team.

Putting aside the inevitable gameplay issues that this method causes, what consequences can it have on the story? Army of Two and Gears of War’s stories don’t suffer because they were written specifically for that kind of game. Now, putting aside all fanboy tendencies, the Halo series has a good story. I enjoyed it and while half of the internet may think it’s cool to hate on Halo, there must be something to the story when books, graphic novels, and comics are being published, and selling very well, based on that story. Imagine if the guys at Bungie had said “Well having co-op in the game sure is fun but the story we’ve planned out just doesn’t fit”, then proceeded to either change the story to fit the gameplay, which may have been disastrous for the franchise, or cut the co-op gameplay that helped make the games sell as well as they did. It’s obvious that they made the right choice by keeping the co-op intact and by the third game they managed to work it into the story.

On the other side of that argument comes a more recent game, Call of Duty: World at War. I really enjoyed the single player portion of World at War but I made a very big mistake. I played the co-op campaign first. You see, when I hear the term co-op campaign, I take it to mean that it is a co-op version of the campaign…maybe I’m crazy. That’s not what you get in World at War. Instead, you get a watered down, unimpressive, barely cohesive mess of levels. The only co-op thing about it is that you get to drag a friend along for the miserable ride. It’s horrendous and the reason is because Treyarch couldn’t pick a method. They didn’t want to interfere with the story and I can understand that because it’s a decent story. However, rather than just leaving the story intact a la Halo, they just cut it out. Sure, there are still a couple of times when your military’s leader will talk to you but after playing through the solo campaign, but it’s unbelievable the amount of very cool stuff, including an entire level, that was cut for the co-op campaign. It’s false advertising. It’s sacrificing the integrity of the game to be able to say “We have co-op too!!!’ World at War is a game that could’ve had a great co-op campaign if it had just been the solo campaign with a buddy thrown in for no apparent reason. He would just be another soldier and it would all make sense.

He’s scared because he’s alone…

There is another class of games that are only tolerable because they can be suffered through with a friend. If it weren’t for the ability to play Haze or Too Human with a friend, there is no way that I could’ve played those games to completion. Kane and Lynch could’ve been a decent game if it had an online co-op mode.  There are games that are just so depressingly awful that they need the ability to have someone with you to share the experience. Misery loves company after all.

While co-op is a great feature to have in games, there are times that it just feels forced and that’s unfortunate. Right now it’s really only happening in the shooter genre, but co-op has a place in action/adventure games as well. Fable 2 had the opportunity to bring co-op into a completely new genre but they failed miserably. My main fear is that developers will start to sacrifice story, emotion, and atmosphere just to be able to advertise a co-op component. While there are some games that are obviously in need of co-op, such as Left 4 Dead, Gears of War, and Halo, there are just as many games that wouldn’t be the same if co-op was forced into it. Imagine a co-op Bioshock. That would be absolutely terrible wouldn’t it? What about Half Life 2? The games atmosphere would be destroyed. Every time I hear that a game is going to have co-op I get a bit worried. Co-op games are definitely important in moving videogames forward but I think  there will always be a need for games that are built to be experienced alone. Hopefully developers will understand this and put their efforts into giving gamers the best of both worlds.