Igenu, dont lie :-) Last time I went to my shop (last SATURDAY) It had a whole shelf of them :-) Berlin, Germany, BTW.

Thomas

Cooperative multiplayer has also a psychological advantage also. Knowing that someone ''has your back'' as you scout the room ahead takes away that artificial paranoia that games like to make. Co-op gives you a sense of friendship, a sense of belonging, and a sense of realism in a game.

A good example would be Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Team Fortress. You log in and you don''t even know the team members half of the time, but you get in and they don''t shoot you. Some actually go so far as to say ''nice shot'' or ''could someone kill that sniper?''. This gives you a sense of belonging, as said before, and I think that it makes the game much more fun.

Perhaps the problem with cooperative games is that the community doesn''t want to be involved(?). Because if you think about it, most coop games, if not played at a LAN party or something, will just be a group of guys on blue team and some guys on red team. They will all do their jobs, (i.e., engineers build the turrets, snipers cover the halls and open areas, Heavy Weapons mow through infantry), but hardly ever do they COMMUNICATE.

I think if there were a way to hook up some voice chat with a whole fleet of players on one side (Lets say they are the imperials against the rebels). I think it would be cool to be able to talk to wingmen while flying... Request assistance from the mothership... Report in... Order my wingmen to do something, or acknowledge my orders from my leader...

The only problem is the players. Who is actually going to jump into the game that much besides me? Most people would hook up and shout profanities and ruin the entire game.

Okay, well that was my 3 cents.

~Dwarf

PS The price for good game ideas HAS DROPPED! It is now 8 cents per dozen (according to DOW Industrial). Change your sigs!!

Shared focus = shared identity + No identity = no meaning == group consciousness - love.

Question: is your success on a computer game ever going to win you love in reality?

Answer will determine viability of MMO paradigm.

Lets take Starcraft`s popular 3v3shared map-type.
It`s a form of map thats user-made.
Basically there are two landmasses with a bridge and each team is on one.
You go and assault the enemy.
It requires communication to do it well.

I like the idea of coop games.

In regard to XvT...
I don`t think any of the XW* games were realistic in covering for others.
I have all of them :-) and none were terribly realistic...even for SW.

How would I do a coop mode ?

Make a coop campaign.

Don`t do a rerun of the SP campaign, do a unique CP mode.

Role playing is very good for coops. Because companies don''t want to edit their characters to require say, that Alpha 1 out of 5 Alpha team members destroys Vesudan base X to get a step of the mission completed instead of Alpha 4, we wind up with games not made to handle coop play. Give each player their *own* powers and weaknesses plus a time limit and coop works well.

void Signature(void* Pointer)
{
PObject(Pointer)->ShowMessage("Why do we need so many pointers?");
};

quote: Original post by shurcool
this is why i found Serious Sam 2 (as well as the original) a lot of fun! the only mode i ever played was co-op, and i have to admit it was a great experience! :D

---
shurcool
my project

aye, i agree completely. just recently was at a lan party and we had about 8 people cooping through serious sam 2. took about 2-3 hours to finish the game from start to finish, but it was definately the highlight of that lan party. the coop in that game is very very well done. just you, them, and a obscene amount of monsters =)

one problem with coop imo, is that it isnt nearly as fun for a group to be playing each from their computers at home (which is unfortionantly the only option most of the time). a coop game of ss2 just isnt quite right, when you arent able to yell across the room to people to come help you out, or that you found the next door or whatnot.

so all that to say, if you really want a good coop experience, your best bet right now is to pick up a copy of serious sam 2, and have a lan party with that included =)

quote: Original post by Dwarf with Axe
...
I think if there were a way to hook up some voice chat with a whole fleet of players on one side (Lets say they are the imperials against the rebels). I think it would be cool to be able to talk to wingmen while flying... Request assistance from the mothership... Report in... Order my wingmen to do something, or acknowledge my orders from my leader...

The only problem is the players. Who is actually going to jump into the game that much besides me? Most people would hook up and shout profanities and ruin the entire game.
...

You are basically correct about what gets said in voice chat. I disabled voice-chat support in half-life the day it was released because ppl were mostly just saying things like "STFU N00BS I OWN YOU ALL" with about twenty times as much profanity (and it was very unstable on my machine, but primarily the former). Also, many of the voices sounded really weird =-) Would be interesting to make a filter that acts like those devices that make a voice sound ''robotic'' so that everybody sounds more uniform... Would be really cool if you could remove accents to make it more understandable, though not sure an algorithm could do that with converting voice->text->voice.

People keep contrasting teamplay and co-op, and in case you didnt know, teamplay is supposed to combine co-op and vs mode. There is some cooperation of good servers (if you ever played on the mourningafter server cluster for CS u know what a good server is like =-), and also when playing with clanmates. I used to play CS all the time on the public servers, always with clanmates, and because we used strategy and cooperated, we usually mopped up the server so much that we were banned (for ''cheating''). Shows how much difference strategy and cooperation makes =-)

Gauntlet is co-op and it''s fun.

Cooperative gameplay is fun but only if you''re playing against the computer or against a roughly balanced human force. Team Fortress and Starcraft both did this well. Team Fortress usually evened up teams automatically and in Starcraft you could set teams from the start.

The problem comes in when a small group of players gets attacked by a large group of players, as is possible in games like Ultima Online. What happens? It''s generally a given that the smaller group loses. At that point all of those skill points you worked so hard for become meaningless. Perhaps you can say this is a fun factor, an unpredictable occurance that makes the game more exciting. I don''t know. I just don''t like that the only way to counter this for sure is by having larger numbers in your groups.

A quote from the RedEye column, in Edge

quote:
but listen. If you are working on a game at the moment, and there is no way of involving other people in the experience, you are restricting your audience to sociophobos, those with a lust for the solitary. Rethink.

Indeed, most pc games have no real way of getting other people involved, not even a splitscreen mode.

[edited by - Ketchaval on July 16, 2002 3:29:07 AM]