What games we can play now? We all can play games where we can progress personaly (individually) with some little co-op, where few people of few parties trying to defeat heavy boss. But lets ask two questions:
- Why do they join into small groups?
- Who gain profit from the raid?
Lets think about second part first. Answer is easy, because everybody want to progress in their own powers/abilities/etc, that is why only player who participate in the raid can gain profit from any raiding activity (all party members in common case).
Lets continue with first question. Why do people who wants to progress as fast as they can will join into parties? Because they have no other choice, they just can not do this on they own because of lack of strength or game limitations. This causes lots of problems in communication between players because some of them are strong enoght to make raid in party, and some of them just want to collect rewards and are storng enough to make raids on their own.
Second group of players that will join parties are those, who just want to chat. They join raids just to spend time with other players. I don't want to recognize intentions, whether player wants to talk. play or hopple raid. The main reason is this group of players is not intentioned to collect rewards.
With this in mind lets try to define co-op multiplayer as networking game where player's own progress is secondary to common game progression.
In order to be less abstract, lets imaging tree like main goal progression where every player of the server "votes" for one or another branch by doing actions that corresponds to specific progression of common goal. On each step of common goal there are no futher goals, but one shim that will give some time to develop new common and personal goals. For an example: ship with colonists have done emergency landing on undiscovered planet that is suitable for living, but ship is highly damages, almost all equipment are broken. Also there are problems with power supply, that is why some of capsules with conolist are going to activate "awaking" protocol (on new player registration). First goal is to recover ship's main control pannel with almost no tools, when goal is achived, shim goal is to get through tons of broken equipment in order to reboot system via "lever" in oposite side of the ship.
Topics of discussion are:
- How to force players to focus on common goal instead of personal without limitations in actions?
- What genres of existing games can be applicable in what aspects of co-op multiplayer and how to organize ability of every player in the games to participate in each and every aspects of the common game progression?
- What goals can be interpreted as common and what properties it must/should/can have?
- How to blur an edge between personal and common goals via actions that affects both without harming induvidual story development/progression?
