It has recently come to my attention that there is a strong possibility of a game that I was really looking forward to both for it's story and coop gameplay, may not actually have full cooperative gameplay. The game is Warhammer 40k : Space Marine and it inspired me to write about how it's not the only title that would have done this, and the possible reasons why the developers decided against full coop gameplay. A few of the more well known titles that have featured a limited coop mode in someway or another are :
-Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 – Spec Ops mode
-Call of Duty : Black Ops – Nazi Zombies
-Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon : Advanced Warfighter – Multiplayer player vs AI modes
-Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six : Vegas (redeemed in Vegas 2) – Limied campaign*
-Company of Heroes – Coop multiplayer game modes in Tales of Valor
-Red Dead Redemption – Coop multiplayer short scenarios with the DLC “Outlaws To the End”
-Grand Theft Auto 4 – Coop multiplayer short scenarios vs AI
-Saints Row – Coop multiplayer short scenarios vs AI
-Portal 2 – Separate campaign
*Campaign with no cutscenes or voices, removal of allied squad mates as well
In my own terms and definition, possibly many others; “limited coop” is any sort of cooperative play against AI that is implemented into the game but doesn't carry over either the entire or the near entirety of the single player experience. This would include things like not having cutscenes or events that the normal campaign would like in Rainbow Six : Vegas unless of course a different cutscene or event is substituted in for coop gameplay to give players a even more different experience from single player.
With that said, there's been quite a few coop games around lately, mainly on consoles, a lot more than in the past in any case with games like Left 4 Dead, and Borderlands around whom completely dedicating themselves to coop almost. However even in this day and age there are a few games that many people would love coop for but the development team doesn't agree for one reason or another, one of the most popular recent cases of this is Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 3.
According to a few articles I've read about the lack of coop play in MW2 and the issue of it in MW3, the developers are aiming to separate the single player and coop story with the reason that there's many things that happen in the single player campaign that having another player around would hinder, however, would it really?
Based off playing Modern Warfare 2 myself there's more than a few things that would take a great deal (or maybe just a bit more, I'm unsure personally) of extra work to have the things in question work with cooperative play such as any of the vehicle sequences in MW2 which weren't exactly the most stable and smooth things in the campaign to begin with, but they are tied in with the story in a way that it makes sense which either leaves the developers the choice of going with it and sticking with single player, or altering the story alittle bit and removing the sequence in favor of coop.
There's also the point that many levels of Modern Warfare 2 have allied soldiers with the player, pretty much all of them have at least 1 friendly character I believe actually. In any case however, usually these characters are highly scripted and while it would be a neat thing to put those scripted events under player control, the NPCs do things that players never actually did in MW2 such as a silent take down on a guard that looked much more indepth than anything the player is capable of. At the same time however, Black Ops showed that doing elaborate scripted events are also possible for the player, but still in Modern Warfare 2's case, adding coop would probably mean that one player gets to do more neat things than the other rather than having a balance between both players.
Essentially there's two main philosophies with cooperative play in campaigns, one is to simply have the additional player(s) as nothing more than hired guns and have no interaction with them at all during story sequences, or to fully design the game with cooperative play in mind, which works well with cooperative play all of the time, but it falls short usually when there isn't someone else around to play the game with. The developers that opted not to have any sort of cooperative campaign probably also thought of that as well as simply having the additional players there without any meaningful placement of them is not exactly the highest level of quality even though usually so long as everything else remains in the game such as story, and cutscenes, it doesn't bother people that much, and it works out in the end, however with standards of quality as they are today, perhaps there's a thought around that having that is too similar to the past, and instead having a high quality single player experience and a limited but also high quality cooperative experience is a better thing to do.
In the end, there's a main reason or another for why developers don't implement coop into the campaign. I personally enjoy playing cooperatively with Alice a lot and we enjoy stories in games as well as the game play itself, which essentially turns us against limited cooperative play, even though those gameplay modes are usually not bad things at all, they're simply design decisions, yet while I say I don't mind it that much, in a perfect world, all of my favorite games would have at least the “hired gun with no interaction” way of cooperative gameplay.
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