Alright Stop, Cooperate and Listen

I’m grateful for the cooperative modes featured in current-gen games like Gears of War, Halo 3 and Rainbow Six Vegas. The option to play through the game with friends adds to the lifespan and can be a great deal of fun, even if you’ve already beaten the campaign on your own. However, once you’ve dispensed with the campaign cooperatively, the appeal often isn’t there for you and your friends to return and play through it together again. You know what’s coming around each corner, you know which weapons and options to use and when to use them, and you’ve already demonstrated that you can best the game together.

Yet, more open-ended alternatives are available within those series. Gears of War 2 has its “Horde” mode, Halo 3 ODST has “Firefight” and the Rainbow Six Vegas titles have “Terrorist Hunt”. In all of them the objective is for a cooperative team to work together to eliminate all enemies. With several maps to serve as stages for the unholy culling available, there’s a decent lifespan to them all. Encounters are broadly the same each time, but there is some variation, and your team is certainly called upon to work together and make tactical decisions in some capacity on the harder difficulty settings. The examples I’ve mentioned are all good ideas that are well executed and add great value to their packages, especially bearing in mind that they are additions to games that already offer full campaigns and competitive multiplayer.

It can get boring for some though. We get used to the maps and the enemy spawning patterns, and the little quirks and exploits. As soon as a team masters a level, the challenge usually evaporates, and so the compulsion to play begins to fade. Beyond that, for the most part teams can be dragged kicking and screaming through those modes by one particularly skilled individual, with only a little bit of true cooperation being essential at certain times.

I think that, for me and many others, the ideal co-op experience is one where your team has to explore, adapt and fight together in an unpredictable world. One where the only way to succeed is as a unit, because the only thing you know about what’s around the next corner is that it’ll finish you off quickly if you fight it on your own. Left 4 Dead and its sequel get very close to that ideal.

Aside from certain sections during Left 4 Dead 2, the physical world you play in remains unchanged from session to session. It’s the enemies and the tools you’re given to fight those enemies that changes. For me, it’s enough to make a world of difference to the re-play value of these two games. Almost every area of every level of every campaign offers several tactical options in terms of layout and structure. Add to this the grotesque, and at times plump, cast of enemies. Then stir in the array of weapons and support items, which is greatly expanded in the sequel. What you end up with is a truly dynamic and hostile game world for a team to inhabit. One where even the most skilled and experienced players will find themselves thrown into a new situation they don’t have a plan for. Generally speaking, with these games Valve have created  a consistent and almost constant challenge for teams that doesn’t just rely on knowledge of maps, enemies and tactics. It also relies on a team’s ability to think quickly and instinctively as a unit.

I want more though. I want the maps and environments to be unfamiliar. Part of the enduring appeal of the early X-Com games was the randomly generated maps in which you would do battle. Though there was understandable repetition in the make-up and decoration of structures, even the player who’d been safely defending Earth from alien invasion for 200 hours would still need to devote tactical resources to scouting and exploring a new battleground properly to reduce their risk once the plasma started flying. Let alone being unaware of what lurks around the corner, often you wouldn’t know where the corner itself started. It’s an extra layer of challenge that keeps those games fresh even now for some players. It would do wonders for the lifespan of a cooperative game, as each individual may adjust to their surroundings in a different way each time they stagger blindly into a mission.

Sadly, I suspect the technical requirements of providing apparently unique environments in a cutting edge 3D title with all other elements on a par with Left 4 Dead would be insurmountable. Time spent on getting the balance right between unpredictability and stability alone would run a high opportunity cost against other areas of the game’s development. So I’ll be quiet and get back to shooting infected. Left 4 Dead is close enough.