Friday, November 26, 2010

Co-Operative Obsession


If you know anything about me, you know I’m a whore for Co-Op gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the utter destruction of other players but nothing compares to progressing through games with friends. In recent times we’ve seen the rise of co-op modes becoming prominent in popular games as well as a number of titles released that feature co-op as a major theme to the game or even have gameplay that completely revolves around co-operative play. I couldn’t be more happy about this progression. 

Quite often co-op used to be relegated to bug-filled, community made mods or games that featured half hearted attempts at the mode. Now I’m not talking about your classics of co-op; your old school arcade titles or beat-em ups (even though my love affair with co-op gaming did start with Golden Axe) so let’s stick to more recent releases as examples so as to not delve into the entire history of gaming. 

I personally remember being at LANs with friends and fumbling around with co-op mods for games like GTA III or Rune back in the day and usually getting too frustrated with the lag issues and game problems that we called it pointless, or the time me and a friend discovered we could force Unreal to load single player maps in multiplayer and play through the campaign. Eventually we discovered Sven Coop (http://www.svencoop.com/ - these guys are still creating co-op action even today) which was a well made mod for Half-Life 1 that purely revolved around supplying players with co-operative maps to play on, whether it was against waves of zombies or playing through HL1 campaign together. Before this most of our co-op gameplay revolved around Diablo 1 and 2 or RTS games against the AI. Not that this wasn’t fun, we just didn’t have a huge amount of variety. Console gaming always gave co-operative gaming a comfortable home, it is so much easier to pick up a controller next to your friend and begin an epic adventure than it is to play online or have LANs.

The Era of Co-Op Shooters

It seems after spending years of time hanging out with beat-em ups and RPGs, co-op had found a new buddy. Shooters.


One of the first games I ever stumbled across that featured co-op as a main theme was Army of Two; a console, cover-based shooter which had built all its action around co-op. A player goes down? Not a prob: head over, drag him to cover and revive him to keep the action moving. Of course this has become a staple of any co-op shooter, the ability to help each other out with resuscitation, boost each other over obstacles, trade gear and generally get each other’s back is now a common seen feature in co-op shooter gameplay.

The difference with Army of Two? This game was built from the ground up to be played with two players, even the story centred on dual main characters. Sure the game could be played single player but the second player’s role would be taken by a bot. This felt very unique for me at the time and so began a resurrection of my love for co-op gaming. Since then I’ve played through numerous shooters with friends that either have a solid co-op mode or are completely designed for co-op, games such as:
  • The Army of Two series
  • Gears of War series
  • Resident Evil 5
  • Borderlands
  • Halo series
  • Left 4 Dead series
Even Call of Duty got their finger in the co-op pie with World at War allowing complete co-operative play through the main campaign and with the now famous zombie mode.

Future of Co-operation?

It appears as if co-operative gameplay is here to stay, it’s making a comeback in a big way. Many gamers are now asking for co-op game modes for their favourite games and developers are responding. I’m sure I don’t need to talk about some of the more popular co-op titles that are in development *COUGH* DIABLO 3 *COUGH* but here a few gems coming out that you may or may not have heard about:

Brink: A co-op FPS that is combining elements of RPG character progression and gameplay with team-based multiplayer.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge: Said to be the dark fantasy answer to Gears of War. Two player cover based shooter with one player taking the role of a spell caster/archer while the other is a melee specialist.

Dungeon Siege III: The third of a hugely successful series of ARPGs.

Portal 2: If you haven’t heard, the sequel to Valve’s masterpiece puzzler will have co-op.

Magicka: A four player humorous ARPG where each player takes the role of a little wizard, allows players to combine their spells to create crazy attacks. 

You better believe I’ll be pissing off everyone I know within a 200km radius to play games with me as co-op gets bigger and better... or just annoying the hell out of my partner :D
The only question that all of this leaves me with is, with co-op now big in three different genres and with game design becoming more advanced and expanding all the time... when are developers gonna start applying the epic awesomeness of co-op gameplay to new and interesting genres? (Yes I know Dawn of War II has co-op campaign which is great for an RTS, but still). I can’t wait to see wait the future will bring... hell, I may just go out there and make the future myself ;)

Monday, November 22, 2010

A Beginning - Majesty 2: A Love/Hate Story.


I am told all tales have a beginning, middle and an end and that you have to start somewhere. So here begins my official journey through Games, Gaming, Game Design and the subculture which is permeated with these subjects.

Without further ado, here is my most recent incident with a lovely little game called Majesty 2:


Years ago I encountered the first Majesty game and had vague memories of it being somewhat fun if a bit slow, this spurred me into picking up Majesty 2 to see what had improved and refresh myself on the somewhat unique style of RTS gameplay the Majesty series employs.

Majesty 2 allows the player direct control over building placement, base upgrades and any affairs that would be the responsibility of a “sovereign” (the name the player is referred to in the game) just like all RTS games. The difference is that all actions involving unit control are under an indirect control system. For example, the player can build a Guild wherever they please which allows them to train Heroes, spend money to train said heroes and then in order to control the heroes they must place flags with rewards attached to them in order to entice the heroes to perform actions. This means if you want to explore and push back fog of war then you must place a flag in the middle of nowhere and apply an appropriate gold reward to the flag to cause the heroes to leave the comforts of your town to explore for you. The smaller the reward or further away the explore flag is, the less inclined heroes will be to do it. Additionally the player is able to place flags on friendly units and buildings in an attempt to have them guarded or on enemy units and buildings ...you get the idea.

All of this gives Majesty 2 a fun and different take on your generic RTS gameplay, I was having a fair bit of fun with it while playing through the campaign. Then came the dragon level.

Go to Google and type “Majesty 2 dr”, you’ll notice that one of the most searched for terms will be ‘Majesty 2 dragon level’. Basically the premise for this level is that there’s a big nasty dragon who wants to do the usual evil dragon stuff and you’re gonna stop it. Fine, fair call. Here’s where things get tricky:

This dragon, named Rafnir, periodically flies to your base, breathes fire all over a building you spent your hard earned money on and then gets the fuck out only to come back and do it all over again later . At the same time; your base is surrounded by flying snake assholes who love to fly from their bust-ass snake ghettos and basically swarm your town. Still, fine. The problem comes when this is the fifth level in the game (if you count the tutorial) and the player hasn’t seen waves of enemies anywhere near this big yet let alone throwing a pissed off dragon in the mix.

The player has been taught through tutorials and learning the hard way how to start a new level. Build a Guild and get some heroes out as fast as possible, build a marketplace for the tax collectors to keep gaining revenue and so the heroes can buy all the heroing gear they need, build a defensive tower or two to hold off any early enemies that stroll by and smell the awesome.

Even if the player surrounds their town with defensive towers (which get increasingly more expensive the more you have) they still can’t hold off all the flying snakes. Spending your starting money on a nice mix of guilds and towers results in you having no money to afford much else and it’s a struggling fight to break even when barely any money comes in, meaning you must spend your miniscule allowance in order can’t train heroes, build buildings and purchase upgrades. Any heroes you do train, usually die instantly due to waves of enemies that they can’t handle as fresh recruits, which in turn makes any hero upgrades you purchase practically useless. Not to mention good old Rafnir flying in every once in a while to rape one of your buildings into a smoldering pile of unrecognizable ash and other random monsters who also wander in every once in a while to join the general pillaging and plundering of your once happy little town.

Maybe it was just me, maybe I just suck at games. Fine, fair enough. I just don’t think it’s right to throw the player in the deep end like that with little to no prior experience in how to handle the fucking lizard-geddon.

One of the best tips I saw from random forums was to build a single, lonely building at the north side of your base and put all your important buildings on the south side. This at least causes Rafnir the hateful dragon to attack that one building and leave your others alone, you can keep rebuilding it as a sort of sacrifice to appease the thing. Seems a fair few players used this advice to get through the level. Good tip, although this feels like exploiting the game AI to complete a level as opposed to actually winning through the methods you’ve been taught thus far in the game. Plus it still doesn’t answer the problem of a tidal wave of pissed off flying snakes.

Any one of a few things would have greatly improved this level for me. More starting money, less flying snake assholes, no random extra monsters wandering in, snake ghettos placed further from the player base to increase their travel time, a longer delay between dragon visits. 

If I had a major lack in vision when playing something in this level and there was an easier way to do this then let me know. But after all my searching, it appears I wasn’t the only one to rage quit, uninstall and delete every trace of Majesty 2 from my system. It seems to me this was one seriously hard level which should have been scaled better to player experience. If it wasn’t for the notorious dragon level, I would still be playing Majesty 2 today.