The Joy of Co-Op

17 Comments

Co-op: our favourite abbreviation. We're not simply talking about your basic multiplayer here, and nor are we singing odes to teamplay in Counter-Strike or World of Warcraft. We're talking co-operation. Two gamers versus a game. That is where the very best gaming moments lie.

But why, given the unusual pleasures of co-op, and its recent surge in popularity, have developers only recently faced up to developing for two players rather than one? Could it be - whisper it - that's it's just too damn difficult?

The Challenge
The joy of co-op is like the joy of conversation. You're not competing - you're working on problems together. Also like conversation, a good co-op session spontaneously generates ideas that you wouldn't have had on your own.

In playing against the computer with a friend, you come up with different and often wholly more entertaining solutions to the problems that games present you with. Whether it's fighting Nazis in Brothers in Arms, or purging a nightmarish hive in Alien Swarm, there's simply nothing better than coming up with a plan, and then saving your best mate when it all goes horribly wrong.

Despite our love for it, co-op has had a patchy history, and there's a crucial reason for this: it's really hard for developers to pull off successfully. The problems for the people making these games have only become worse over the last decade. The issue is one of complexity.

The simpler games, such as Quake or Doom, didn't really create many problems for designers in terms of implementing co-op. They were essentially just rooms with monsters and traps, so all they had to do was drop in a second player model and Bob's your uncle sitting next to you with his PC linked up to yours.

But as games began to learn the lessons of Half-Life and Tomb Raider, such simple solutions became impossible. When an experience was ever-so-carefully scripted for the enjoyment of a single player, dropping in co-op - and a second player - became a task too far. Games broke down, enjoyment faltered, and the whole exercise became too much effort to bother with.

Today, it seems that developers are beginning to crack the problem. Not only that, but their ambitions are bolder and their intention to provide co-op far clearer. Where games have long bolted co-op on as an afterthought or a neat alternative multiplayer option, new games such as Kane & Lynch, Left 4 Dead and Gears of War have taken co-op as their central motif.

With a second character on hand, often controlled by smart AI during a singleplayer session, there's an option for player two to drop in and play through a level with their chum. It's not just a case of adding a model for player two, it's a matter of making the second character absolutely integral to how the game works. How long, we wonder, before the big shots like Half-Life 2 have a second playable protagonist?

Developers, many of whom used to shudder when we asked them about co-op, are now warming to the idea. Harvey 'Deus Ex' Smith became rather animated when talking about BlackSite's proposed drop-in/drop-out co-op mode, although he was happy to admit that it was a genuinely tough problem: "We started off being so arrogant that we said "oh, co-op will be easy" but then at every turn it has fucked us.

"It's amazing how you can be in a room full of MIT grads, and people who have been working on games for ten years and play all the games, and look at the helicopter with one turret on it and then someone finally says 'What about player two?'"

About Player Two
The lesson for Smith's Midway team was that two heads aren't necessarily better than one when you're trying to balance a complex action game for play. "It's about tuning," says Harvey. "It affects everything from how hard it is to play, to how many enemies you can get on screen. It even affects the fiction. It's a fun part of the game though, so I hope it works in the right way."

Alas, as it turned out, it was too tricky for even Mr Smith. Co-operative play was dropped from BlackSite just weeks before our review.

One group of developers who have consistently made it work the right way are the modders-turned-pros Black Cat, who made Thievery and Alien Swarm, and who are now working on Infested, a commercial version of Alien Swarm for the Source engine.

Black Cat's Jonathan Sutton told us a little of what a co-op focus meant for their game design: "At the basic level, we provide tons of information about what the other players are doing. The overhead view helps with this, as you can easily see where your squadmates are positioned and what they're doing. Then we have all sorts of detail on the HUD, showing you various stats about the other marines, such as their ammo, if they're reloading, getting hurt, and so on. We also have about 100 speech cues that fire off automatically in response to game events."

It's this kind of scaffolding to a player's perception that the developers of co-op are having to come up with, in order to make the experience one in which the players complement each other, rather than simply being bodies in the same shooting gallery. Having one player able to pull the other to his feet while under fire in Gears of War is only possible because the upright player can see his mate's location on the overview, for example.

The other way to make co-op compelling is to make the players interact with the game through their own skill sets - as we've long seen in RPGs. "We make sure the various equipment and skills in the game all have their own special role," says Sutton. "In this way, you come to rely on the other players throughout the game, as their skill and equipment selection will be better suited to certain problems.

"We also have direct dependencies, like relying on the medic for healing, or the guy carrying the ammo bag throwing you a spare clip when you're running low."

We'll have to wait until Infested turns up to see whether Black Cat actually know what they're talking about, but their previous work hasn't shamed them so far. An even safer bet is Cliff Bleszinski and his co-op shooter, Gears of War, which has already been a blockbusting beast of a game on the Xbox 360, and is now enjoying a PC release.

Bleszinski talks of how tricky the co-op solution has been for modern developers, but he no longer believes that it's a hurdle developers should choose to avoid. "It is difficult," he admits, "but if you want to have a multi-million selling shooter you have to have a great singleplayer and a solid co-op mode. I think there's a huge gulf between casual and hardcore players, and co-op is a way to bridge that.

"You can have a husband and wife, with one player leading another through the game. She might feel less intimidated with her husband's help. It's this kind of stuff that will bridge that gap."

The most successful British game of the last couple of years was all about bridging that gap. It was Lego Star Wars, which features co-op play throughout. The Lego team's executive producer, ex-PC Gamer Deputy Editor Jon Smith, says "Our primary goal was to create a game which kids could play, but which parents would be able to help out with directly - by picking up a gamepad and jumping into the game itself, rather than having to shout advice from the sidelines."

This is one of the most immediate and direct co-op experiences gaming has to offer - and it's as much about solving puzzles as it is performing action-oriented death. Incredibly, Jon points out, this was one aspect of the game that the press uniformly ignored. Why? Because the reviewers played the game on their own. Perhaps if they'd made an effort to get their mum to play with them review scores would have been higher still.

Hands Across The World
Challenges for co-op remain. As more players are catered for in a game, so the number of things a developer has to think about escalates. Even cutscenes become more complicated, as Cliff Bleszinski explains: "As developers, we have to craft the cinematic experience with co-op in mind.

"There's always the other character. What is Dom (the secondary Gears of War character) doing? What is he doing if he's played by AI, and what is he doing if he's controlled by another player? The more characters you have, the more you have to figure out how you integrate them into the game."

The interest co-operative play has generated in huge development houses such as Epic mean that there's another, even bigger ramification for PC gamers: co-op modding tools. Gears of War has arrived on PC bundled with a complete level editor: all the tools required to make co-op work in a mod.

Transforming singleplayer mods into co-op mods will become a hell of a lot easier with this new toolset - the one that Epic themselves used to put their game together.

"I'd love to see more co-op mods," says Bleszinski. "Modders often take the regular co-op mode and say 'OK, we're going to do this game, but in World War II', but maybe they should take the co-op mode and say 'OK, now we can make this puzzle-oriented'. There are so many more cool ways to interact with each other."

In time both developers and modders will be able to come up with cool ways to create variants for new game concepts such as Left 4 Dead, which brings a hybrid of co-operative zombie-bashing and traditional multiplayer to the PC.

Left 4 Dead suggests ways in which gamers could create incredible co-op mods: an Evil Dead mod with two players trapped in the demonic cabin in the woods, an Aliens mod with Left 4 Dead's zombies turned all H R Giger, a riot game with shopkeepers defending a store from looters...

Turn your co-op imagination to other games, such as the new Lego Batman and Indiana Jones titles, and you start to see that the possibilities are endless.

In fact, once they have the Gears of War and Left 4 Dead toolsets under their belts, there's every possibility that modders, rather than developers, could be the ones who end up breeding the next generation of co-op game. Their enthusiasm can only make things more varied and more interesting for us. The future of co-op is bright, and it's only just begun.

Jim Rossignol