I was thinking about games and how they are today. Multiplayer is now a very important part of games, and solo missions are becoming much more advanced with AI. Well, I was thinking about how games can advance with much more sofistication and realisation, but what about solo missions incorperated into multiplayer? Instead of coding teammate AI, there could just be 8 players at once helping eachother to acheive the same goal? That would be something. I have been trying to code a little bit of it to see if I could incorperate it, and it seems quite simple. Also, with multiplayer growing, instead of developers having to remake maps and rescript objects, the game could be like a wiki which the user base just contributes to. Graphics could be updated, payment for good maps/sciprts, et cetera. I am trying to do all this with my next game, but I would like to see what others think of the idea.

I believe Guild Wars uses a quest based system, which enables you to progress through all the quests/story with friends.

It obviously works as it seems to be pretty popular. Is this the type of thing you were looking for?

That would be cooperative multiplayer. Which we already have. The best example that springs to me for me is swat3, you have players take the role of swat to work together to beat terrorists. Game like Wolf:ET allow teams of players to work together to beat other teams of players. Cooperative multiplayer is something I find very fun with the right people and I think it is massively underrated compared to more deathmatchy games. Of course, it really boils down to the players.

Ah, I see what you mean. I was thinking more on the lines as the game being completely story based where you go through the levels, but the whole game is iwht friends and just other people online to do the missions. You would help eachother get through, and when the game is finished, you still go through the world of the game and you can end up making up missions for others to do by using th scripter and the level editor. I think what I am talking about is pretty much on the lines of what you guys have said, but I was thinking that the game could be basicly a user base where the users decide the new missions and maps and graphics.

Two words: co-op and modding community. Well, that's more than two words but you get the idea.

Games like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament got a huge boost by their modding and mapping communities. Those are prominent examples but the same goes for many other games - people creating content for others. When I'm on a LAN playing Serious Sam co-op, we'll download some custom maps and check them out. When we want to play CoD, we take a look at some custom maps. And so on.
Both of the things you want already exist. The co-op mode is the easiest thing you can do, a modding community for your game takes much more to get going. Get your game popular and provide and promote easy-to-use tools and documentation: that's what's important to mappers. They want a public to map for and good (and preferrably easy) tools, and of course a good and fun game to express themselves in.
The easier the tools, the more accessible it will be. Then it wont take a group of friends a long time sifting through maps they don't like, but they can create their own thing without much effort. The 'real' mappers will probably look down on such maps, but for that group of friends it'll be good fun.

If you want to put some of these maps into the official rotation for your game, you'll need quality monitoring to maintain a certain level of quality though. I don't think it'll be as simple as a wiki to keep the game playable.

That's the way I see it, being a mapper for 5 years now. :)

I've got you. Thanks for helping me out with that. I have another question about these games, do you think that they are any good? Do you like co-op games? What are the pros and cons of them.

I usually prefer co-op to deathmatch, particularly if there's a significant skill difference between the players. A lot of console FPS games seem to have this feature these days (Timesplitters, Perfect Dark, and I think Perfect Dark Zero has this as a key feature). I first played through the full version of Doom in co-op, rather than in single player. And there's always classics like Gauntlet, and multiplayer RPGs like Neverwinter Nights as well.

The pro in my view is that co-op games aren't head-on competitive like in FPS deathmatch; the win of one player doesn't mean the loss of another. The best co-op games I've played still has some friendly rivalry; getting to the loot before the other player, getting the most kills in a FPS etc., but you can still rely on another player to help you out if you are in trouble. This is why it's a good game if there's a big gap between skill levels; a stronger player can help out the weaker ones. I also find the kind of competition in co-op games (such as who is the better player) to be more friendly and fun than in most head-to-head games.

The big con is that most co-op depends on the team being (mostly) nice to each other. It only takes one total jerk to be on your team to ruin it for everyone else. This is why co-op seems to be better with known friends on a team, preferably in the same room either around a console, a single PC, or at a LAN party.

Well, I had an idea that would get rid of the total jerks: having private co-op games where you and your buds just put in a game room name and the people allowed to play and it matches it up so you can just play with buddies.