Be Excellent To Each Other

This just occured to me while reading about the forthcoming Borderlands, which is touted as four player co-op action-adventure.

I don't think it really is possible to do multiplayer co-op unless your compatriots are dedicated to taking it 'seriously', or if the game forces them to.

I say this as I've played a lot of singleplayer-oriented games that have a co-op mode, and have found that playing them is like an episode of MST3k... you skip through all the story bits making sarcastic jibes, laugh your way through dramatic moments and any suspension of disbelief rocks wildly before collapsing like the Tacoma Narrows bridge.

System Shock 2, for example, became little more than a first person shooter, but one with more limited resources. Messages from Polito, audio diaries, coming across the corpses of the distressed or scenes of tragedy... all were scurried through to the next objective.

Halo 3, likewise. For all its po-faced seriousness, the desperate struggle of humanity is laughed at merrily when there's four of you, as you accidentally crash your jeep or announce how you just knocked a Brute flying.

Duke Nukem and Doom, while very light on story (kill the aliens!), similarly become little more than a blur of scenery that you rush past to reach the next level with your cackling cohorts.

Which brings me back to Borderlands. Maybe I've always played with the wrong people, but I can't imagine playing it co-op and getting anywhere near as involved in the story as if I were to play it alone. Conversations with NPCs would be skipped through, plot twists and revelations would be talked over, and the entire time would be little more than a whirlwind tour through it all.

I can't imagine pen and paper roleplayers rushing their campaigns in this way, so why does it happen in video games?

Because you're in control, and to sit back and enjoy while in single player mode is one thing, but to sit back and enjoy in multiplayer means taking control away from everyone else should they want to do this bit differently.

And almost all videogames have terrible, terrible writing and hackneyed, lousy plots and characters.

I imagine the only way a co-op story would work if it was one where you had to pay attention to the snippets of text, the cut scenes to know what you had to do next. I like to take my time in games which is why I rarely play Diablo II against randoms as they're determined to race through the game as fast as humanly possible, grab any items before anyone else and generally grind it - although they've probably seen the story a dozen times over anyway I guess.

This was meant to be taken with the quality (or lack thereof) of game plots aside, as that's a whole other topic.

My point was how it seems impossible to ever have a co-op journey through a game with a story. Imagine, for example, multiplayer Mass Effect. Instead of one player, everyone controls one of the crew... one controls Shephard, one controls Williams, one controls Alenko... You could go around together and have group conversations with NPCs; or each go off and do your own thing, agreeing to meet later at the bar or back at the ship. It's all the same quests, you just choose to do them together or apart. If you ran into trouble hacking a console, you could call the player who had a higher hack skill to come and help. Likewise, if you expected trouble, you could ask someone to come with you. Or, you could all split up and accomplish your tasks more quickly, meeting to share the results of your investigations. When you got to a planet, some would go off in the Mako while others would explore the installations on foot.

Would this work? I realize it sounds a lot like an MMORPG, but what I'm hoping for is a more tightly-scripted storyline with a definite end, as opposed to the more open-endedness of MMORPGs.

I'm a bit disappointed that I never really worked out the story to Halo 3, despite playing it all the way through on Legendary co-op.

maybe this will change with four person co-op call of duty 5 on veteran. 'fuck dimmers has died! this is like real war, were fucked!"

Co-op games are my favourite types, but the ensuing chatting and tomfoolery doesn't lend itself to watching a story at the same time.

This is what I mean - and the only ways I see around it are either to play with people who are willing to go along with the game and watch the story... or to force them to.

It's occured to me earlier that an ideal model for this sort of thing would be Privateer. You'd have a selection of random mission generators to go to, but you'd also have story mission givers for when you fancied something a bit meatier, talkier and plottier. So when you wanted chatting and tomfoolery, you could just get a random mission, head out and talk bollocks... but when you wanted the proper story, you'd go and do the next story mission.

I realize the fatal flaw in all of this is that for it to truly work, you need to all have started the game together, and to always play with the same people as much as possible. You couldn't share the same debate about 'I wonder what happens next' or 'I wonder what we should do next' if one or more of you have already finished the game or is far ahead in the story. And, sadly, this would be almost impossible to arrange, especially on forums (not just this one) where people rush out to buy a game on release and then plough through it as quickly as possible. I frankly can't understand why you'd do this... you can't expect to appreciate the game if you run through it at full tilt.

What you talk about sounds *almost* like EvE. Although the story is advanced by CCP and you're a minnow it, you have no *real* influence. You can also ignore the story altogether should you choose to do so.

No no, I want a story like you'd get in any other single player game... but with the ability to play through it in co-op.

MMORPGs don't really fit with that.

I don't want to buy your crack Sheepeh!

You can have my crack for free, Dimrill.

Offline co-op works better. If you're sat in the room with someone playing through a game, I find you're more likely to pay attention to the storyline. Unfortunately the gaming world is abandoning offline co-op in favour of Live.

No kidding... the number of simple card and board games on XBLA that DON'T have local co-op is frankly sickening. Uno is bad enough, but Spyglass Board games (four games where you can always see your opponent's pieces so there's no tactical subtlety lost by sharing the same screen) not having it is downright idiocy. I'd have played it loads if it had local co-op.

Thing is, you can't really go far from each other unless it's split screen, which is a bit of a shame. Eternal Sonata has 'co-op' play, in that other players can control the other characters in the battles. Perhaps something along the lines of Secret of Mana, then?

Not on the official lore, but you can carve out a story of your own, and act upon cues to that. There were several factions I avoided as best I could, due to the stories I had heard, and that made me enjoy it. That and trying to advance 'my story' onto others was fun. ("Your ship ransom has been set at 546 units of livestock, do you have these?" for whe In was trying to create a station that had looney amounts of livestock in it, so I could pretend to be a space cow farmer trying to hawk a living.)

Fable 2 WON'T HAVE ONLINE CO-OP right away.

'Within a week' they claim. Even further bollocks to it.

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