The Lack of Optional Modes in Favor for Competition

 

            Hello. @NEETproxy and I have been a little bored and looking for co-op games to play but there’s nothing really out there. The stuff that is out there is all the same shit from three, four, five years ago and/or more. I feel like I’ve made this post before, but can’t find it, or I’ve just mentioned bits of it in a bunch of other posts so hopefully this one will kind of be a compilation of it all.

            There’s not a ton of co-op games that you can just pick up and play. I remember years and years ago friends of mine would play RE4’s Mercenaries and Gears of War 2’s Horde Mode all day long. Correct me if I’m wrong (not like anyone will) but in those games you pretty much picked a character and that was it. There was no upgrading, no leveling, basically no grinding. In Gears you would just take weapons from the fallen enemies and I think in Mercenaries each character had their own set basically? Their own “kit” as the kids say. (Do they still say that??) I just remember my friend always liked playing the “bow-bitch,” whoever that is, but that was fun, that was entertaining, you just were given something relatively simple and got to run with it. Now everything is about unlocking stuff, being competitive or a slow crawl grindfest because the company wants you to play their game as long as possible and they know they didn’t add enough content to keep you engaged without the grind.

            When @NEETproxy was searching Steam for co-op games the number one on the list was Apex Legends. Yes, it’s technically a co-op game but it’s a co-op multiplayer and that’s not what we’re looking for today Steam. Exoprimal seems like a cool concept. I think when it first was announced Kyle Bosman and/or Maximilian Dood said the phrase “what a video game” because it was. It looked liked just some stupid fun, dinosaurs raining from the sky, you play as some kind of mech or mech suited person and just fight dinosaurs. Cool. But. There has to be a but. After fighting the dinos then you have to fight another team who was also fighting dinos. Why? If you’re both fighting dinosaurs and are probably from the same “organization” shouldn’t you just you know, work together? I imagine if I do play this, after the dino fights I’m just going to drop my controller and let the other team win. It’ll piss off my team but this mechanic, if you want to call it that, kind of pisses me off so. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this one before but when Halo CE came out I don’t think Bungie was looking for it to be this multiplayer, e-sports wonder. They made a game, with a story and tacked on a multiplayer and people just really liked being able to link a ton of Xboxes together and play in the same area together. It wasn’t balanced by any means but it was fun because of that. I think Halo 3 really started to get more e-sporty and it only got more so the years after. Instead of making a game with a good story and multiplayer tacked on it’s the other way around. Their prime focus is the multiplayer and they’re just like “oh who cares about the story, no one’s gonna play that anyway.”

            I thought it was a Dunkey video, maybe even something Yahtzee did but I can’t find it but someone was talking about fighting games and how there’s not really anything to do in them anymore. There’s the arcade, multiplayer and maybe some random iterations of arcade mode. Tekken used to have Tekken Force, Soul Calibur 4 had Tower of Lost Souls, Blazblue CS2 for 3DS had Abyss mode, these were fun things to do that weren’t about the competitive aspect of the game. They were a little grind-y but it wasn’t awful. I hear Soul Cal 2 & 3 had some fun Tower of Lost Souls like things to do also but they’ve been missing in recent games. I think that fighting games should understand their place in their genre, meaning; not every one of them has the potential to be the top competitive game and that’s okay! I don’t think Soul Cal or even Dead or Alive are ever going to be on the same level as Street Fighter or Tekken. Sure you’re going to have your niche groups that play those games competitively but you should know you’re not going to be bigger than Street Fighter so you should do something different to bring players in and keep them interested. Put in different modes that only your game can offer and people will stick around for that reason alone. Every fighting game has its following but some of them don’t have delusions of being the top dog. They know what they are, they know their players and they build around that. I really like Soul Cal for the most part, I like the weapons. I like Ivy’s sword, I like Tira’s hoop thing, Talim’s tonfas, Seong’s spear, and oh yeah, 2B is in the newest one. I forgot about that, man that’s such a bummer. I’d love to play around with her in something other than arcade over and over and over again.

            I know I’ve mentioned this before too but recently in Monster Hunter and now Wild Hearts the monsters scale with how many players are well, playing and I’m not the biggest fan. In old Monster Hunter the village quests were typically easier and the hub quests were tougher but that challenge was the fun. I remember watching a girl fight Hellblade Glavenus X by herself with no palico support and it was impressive. Now it kind of seems like “why bother play with other people if the monster is basically not going to be any harder one way or the other?” Wild Hearts is a little different though, could just be because I suck but fighting solo is damn hard. Similarly with the Pokemon Tera-raid evens; there’s one out right now for a bug tera type Samurott and I was watching Austin John take it on for his first time and he went in solo. “Odd” I thought. When you go into these raids solo you get three NPCs, I figured you’d WANT three more humans cause clearly that should be a better option. But he was playing, he didn’t win the first couple times but eventually he did. So I was like okay, I kind of get the gist, I’ll queue up and hope my team can get this done. I’ve been trying to use a support type Pokemon because most people don’t, like in most games, but it wasn’t really working out, I lost a lot. Then Austin John shared a new strategy with a fire Tauros, again, playing solo. “Okay” I thought, I’ll go find me one of those, blah blah blah, but then as I was thinking about it I was like “well, I’ll have to do some more normal raids to get rare candy things cause I don’t have any, murmur murmur murmur” so I stopped doing that. Part of the Tarous strategy is using tail-whip of all things and I have a Azumarill I got for raids and was like, “eh, I’ll teach her tail-whip and go from there” cause Azumarill has a lot of health. I decided to host the fight this time and someone with a Tauros joined and I was like, “ha, maybe they know what they’re doing” and I waited for a few seconds and no one else joined so I was like “screw it, we’ll just go.” We get in and they have a water Tauros. Fuckkk I didn’t notice. Oh well. And we’re going and it’s kind of going okay. That’s when I kind of noticed that only when a player Pokemon faints does the timer for the fight go down. I’m assuming this is the reason Austin John was playing solo. So me and this guy are going and I’m doing some cheers and using the tail-whip and it’s kind of working, and then we won. GG friend. But like, to me, it shouldn’t be this way, if you have a mode that’s specifically centered around people playing together why would you make it so much more advantageous to do the raid solo? If that’s how it’s going to be then why not base it around a traditional turned based strategy game where you can use three or four of your own Pokemon? I think it was Black and White that did the triple battles right? Do that but tweak it a bit. I never understood having light screen or tailwind just for it to run out by the time the Pokemon that cast it faints. The rest of the team/fight doesn’t benefit unless you want to swap out your Pokemon constantly. I’m not about that.

            The Skywalker Saga Lego game is pretty fun to co-op but it kind of sucks on Steam. We do “remote play” with @NEETproxy’s game but it kind of lags and sometimes the graphics get all fucky but it’s still (was, game froze on my end a couple times last time we tried to play) was manageable. The game had a sale, during the holidays probably, and I was thinking of getting so maybe we could still play together but it would run better on my end but as I was looking into it I find that you can’t play co-op in that way. You can do remote co-op or splitscreen but not with each person having their own copy. Why? What the actual hell? Can’t win! I just can’t win! Just like in Splatoon!

            So that’s that. Any thoughts? I have no thoughts left. Brain empty. All done. Bye-bye.

           @AztecSauce

        My head is so empty I don't even have any ideas for a picture this time. Here, a robutts picture of Splatoon.