Make Co-op Rewarding

            Hey! I got a good idea for a post! I do, I promise! Yes it kind of came up while playing Breakpoint but that’s besides the point! Topic: I wish games that focus on co-op would reward us for being cooperative. In my time with most games the co-op experience isn’t much different than the solo experience.

            In games like World Of WarCraft or even The Division 2 you have different classes and it behooves you to choose a different class then your friends or teammates. In WoW and The Division you have tanks, DPS and healers, typically, and in the early game it doesn’t really matter what you do but in the late game it most defiantly does. In the good old days of WoW if you were a normal/casual player there was no real reason for you to pick a healing spec while you quested but if you were any type of healer class you were sought after for low level dungeons. As an elemental shaman I was able to heal through things like Wailing Caverns but it was rough and I’d have to drink to get mana back after most fights but that only lasts so long. Once you get to harder dungeons you can’t get by by being a different spec and expect to heal. You need those specific talents in restoration or holy so you can heal more and use less mana.

            But most games aren’t like that, especially co-op focused games because the developers typically want the game to appeal to the most people and that means making it simple and easy so any class is able to win. Which is fine if you don’t want to challenge yourself or that’s not your idea of fun but some of us want a bit more. I remember the older Monster Hunter games hub areas were pretty challenging. The hubs were the co-op zone for MH and were typically harder. I remember having a hard time while trying to fight a Rathian on my own but once my friends got on we destroyed it no problem. In Monster Hunter World they started scaling the monsters difficulty by how many people were in the quest so essentially it is always the same difficulty weather you’re solo or have a full party and I don’t like that. I’m not saying I want it to be so super easy that I don’t even have to try but if I can just as easily do it alone then what’s the point of getting a group together? And if you are some kind of super badass at Monster Hunter than going into the hub and being able to beat a monster that groups of four have a hard time with is quite the achievement. I think now with World and Rise people focus more on speed running a monster, which can still be impressive, but just a quick look on Google and it looks like the speed runs for groups vs solo aren’t that far off. Obviously in the world of speed running a second is everything but if a person can solo a monster in 1:53 and a group can do it in 2:05 it seems like a moot point to me.

            I remember when Diablo 3 was first being shown off and each character’s spells were going to have different runes to activate so you could play differently depending on you know, whatever. So you could change a moves’ elemental type or cooldown or range or make it a damage over time spell or slow people down ect. So when I first saw this and was looking up information about each character I noticed things like “deals more damage to slowed enemies” and on another character saw “change this move to ice to make enemies slower” so I’m thinking “oh, cool, I could pick this character then my friend could pick that character and it’d make a good combo.” But, as far as I remember, yes those things could work like that but it was more for your own benefit. It was more “do this move first to make them slow then use this move that does more damage to slowed enemies yourself.” Diablo 3 can be a very hectic game so coordinating with your team isn’t always an option. You’d really have to know what each other was doing at all times and usually it’s just: there’s a huge wave of enemies, pick a direction, take em out and when you’re done, help your friend.

            The Division 2 does a pretty good job of having perks and abilities that help your team but there’s still some perks that aren’t the best. For instance, I like to tank with Firewall, it’s a specialization where your unique weapon is a flamethrower and you can use it with a small riot shield of sorts. The Firewall’s special handgun, or whatever, is a sawed off shotgun that makes people hit by it either take more damage from fire or catch fire quicker, something like that, so that suggests that your “rotation” should start with this shotgun into the flamethrower and there are also weapon perks that do more damage to people on fire so it’s kind of particular. I don’t want to limit myself to that kind of build, there are plenty of other gun perks that are a lot more helpful and my friends probably have things more helpful then doing more damage to burning people (sounds so awful while I type this) or things for their own specs. One build I like that isn’t exactly tank-y armor, I don’t think, is enemies that are close to me take more damage from all sources. Helpful! I have my riot shield, I’m up in everybody’s business with my automatic shotgun and my friends can be at a safe distance, targeting the people around me. There’s another perk that when I deploy my shield my team gets armor so if I notice they’re getting low on health I put away my shield and take it back out and it gives them some more time to live.

            So this brings me back to Ghost Recon. The classes in Breakpoint don’t really matter much. The game seemed to be originally designed for a single player experience where you got to play how you wanted. You want to be loud and in everyone’s face, you can play assault. You want to be stealthy, here’s… fucking I don’t remember, panther? The icon was a panther. But when you play together as a group there’s not much benefit for one person to be assault and charge in while you quietly pick off people that don’t notice you’re there. Sure it can work but it’s almost just better for you all to try and snipe as many people as possible before screwing up or moving in to finish the rest. It might be different if we had more people to play with but that also sounds like more opportunities for things to go wrong. And when you don’t even know what a mission is going to be like until you start it doesn’t help. You either make your way to a site, survey the land and realize your kit won’t work so you have to fast travel back to a bivouac to change weapons or die a few times and go “ok, this isn’t working.” Again, maybe it’s because it’s usually just @NEETproxy and I so we each bring a silent DMR or sniper and then something loud and fast for when things go bad or we have to shoot at trucks or something but I’d like a little more versatility. To me, rather than these classes, it’d be better to just have different weapons or ammo for certain things. One person could bring a DMR with armor piercing rounds for helmets and a shotgun in case someone gets too close. The other could bring a silenced SMG and an LMG with armor piercing rounds and EMP grenades for drones. I know there are the classes that do more damage to drones or give you one extra bar of health but this way sounds better to me. Breakpoint just seems like another case of everybody needs to be able to do everything. I feel like this isn’t conveying my thoughts right but I’m not sure how else to describe it and I feel like I’m just repeating myself. For a game that was made for a single player experience, going about the game how you please, the different classes just don’t seem to matter. You can finish the game without switching classes so why bother have them? I think that’s the best I can do. It’s like, “if everyone is “special” then no one is.” I hope that makes sense. One thing that I think would be helpful in Breakpoint is if when you aim at an enemy you saw how much health they’d lose if you took the shot. @NEETproxy and I were talking about this because I know I’ve seen it before and we think it was in Assassin’s Creed Origins but I would like that in BP, for the flying drones if nothing else. When I look at a drone I want to know if I can kill it or if I’m just going to piss it off so I should shot it more than once.

So, I wish for more reasons to play with other people or to use different play-styles. I want to be reward for teamwork rather than “yeah, there’s two of you now, whatever.” Maybe if there were things like this I’d be more likely to actually play with randoms online. It kind of makes me think of some Mega Man games where depending on which order you do the levels; other levels will change and make it easier for you. Like, I want to figure it out for myself without the game telling me and in this day with the internet if I want to know something I can look it up or, more accurately what will happen is I just stumble upon it on YouTube and will be like “oh cool, I didn’t know that, let me try that.” Let the community experiment and spread awareness. If there’s a game where one character has fire and ice moves and another has moves that do more damage to poison things or slow things, depending on what they pick, and you can be like “hey, my guy slows people down with ice, so your other move would be better.” I don’t know. I feel like I’m not making sense at this point.

One last thing I want to bring up again is story in co-op games. For the most part, THROW THAT SHIT OUT. We don’t caaaaaarrrrreeeee. We briefly played The Ascent and Outriders last year and all I remember is skipping through the cutscenes as fast as possible so we could get back to the bad gameplay. When it is a purely co-op game there is no real reason to try and give us a story when you yourself are making this to be a co-op game. The truly good, story based games are more often then not single player experiences where the player WANTS to be captivated by the story alone, at their own pace. No one wants to waste what little time they have to play games with their friends to listen to some generic bullshit that we’ve heard a thousand times before. Deep Rock Galactic is a perfect example of how to do co-op right. Here’s your gun, here’s a mission, fucking go. (Backing up a little since I brought Deep Rock up; it would be nice if some of their classes would synergize with the other classes. @NEETproxy uses a goopy gun that I think should be flammable so my characters incendiary grenades could set the goop on fire. Just saying.) Stop wasting our time and your own time doing this. Why write this stuff up when you know that maybe what, 1 out of every 100 people maybe is going to stop and listen to it? Does that one person noticing your work really make it worth the time of doing it? I’m one to talk, I know but I do this for me more than anything else. When you write the lore for games are you writing it for yourself?

That’s that I suppose. What are your thoughts? Know of any games that have rewarding co-op synergy? Let me know below and I’ll catch you later. 

 @AztecSauce

 

Image by: @Andaerz