Don't Take My Med-kit Man!

So I just finished up the Campaign of Warhammer Dawn of War II on the PC.

Yes, I know it came out a while ago and the expansion is due out this month, but there is a reason it took me so damn long.

I didn't want to play it alone.

Don't get me wrong, I love single player games, but not when they have the option open for Co-Op on the campaign missions.

I feel the nature of gaming needs to evolve, more of what we consider to be story based games need to have the option to play with multiple characters, and I have to say THQ did it pretty damn well with their DOW II campaign. They let you play the Force Commander. And whichever of the co-op players hosts the game gets to play at the primary player in this game, but it doesn't deter in the slightest. I have to say their design actually makes the game more enjoyable by cutting down on the amount of micromanagement of 4 squads (in co-op you only need to manage two squads each) that is needed to progress through the gameplay.

One of the things I noted was how easy the game seemed, until I set the difficulty on Insane.

Yeah, it really met up with the label.

It took skill, real teamwork and communication to get through it.

And it was more damn fun than I've had in ages.

Gaming today seems to have only rare instances of multi player story modes or cooperative play, and this is, I think, one of the greater faults in it. Multiple play-through capability is one of the better innovations, similar to the Knights of the Old Republic, Fable and Mass Effect RPG standards of allowing the player to choose different reactions. But the problem is you are still facing a content designed for a single player to guide the storyline.

Imagine those games if you had party members that up and decided, No, they didn't like the fact that you were turning evil, and because it was your buddy playing the character, you can't just kill it off, but actually have to adapt to one player playing goody two shoes, and the other play evil demon spawn. How will the end result of the game turn out. You open the possibility for development to more than just good, evil and neutral endings at that point. It has the potential then to become something so much more than it was, 15, 20, 50 or more possibilities. And yeah, they don't have to be that divergent so as to take away from the development time or budget, but you've just opened up 15 new playable paths and extended the life of your game by at least a few more days. More if it's a game as long as Mass Effect.

And that's just talking RPG style games. One of the most bitched about 'features' of first person shooter games is how dumb your squad mate's AI is. Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talking about. They run into walls, they shoot at the sky or the ground or at a wall because there is an enemy hiding behind it. Why not allow your 3 best buddies to take control of those AI instead, and actually allow real communication squad combat?

Then up the difficulty. Because more players means you don't have to play candy ass, feed me through a tube difficulties, it makes the time players spend playing your game a lot longer, and you now have 4 purchases of the title rather than one because they can play it together, and not in a "can we all happen to get on the same team so we don't have to fight each other" sort of way.

This actually leads into another concept, but I'll leave it for another day.

Game Industry, listen up, cooperative play is nothing but good for your game and replay value and bringing gamers together and creating a social establishment of gamers playing together. How is this a bad thing? Social gaming isn't just the future, it's now. Get on the ball.

Ciao.