Singular Thoughts - Limited Cooperative Play

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.

Singular Experiences : First Achievements (Xbox 360)

When achievements were integrated and added into the Xbox 360 system through gamer points and the achievements that granted those points, I was very excited as I loved doing things that added to a total lifetime score. I bought one of the systems about when Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion was released because that was the single game that I wanted a Xbox 360 for. While it was very expensive, I ended up spending a very long time in Oblivion and I loved every moment of it. Besides enjoying the game, buying a 360 also introduced me to the achievement system, and while I consider myself a long time gamer, I hadn't really seen a similar system ever except for maybe on a few web pages, making it quite revolutionary for me, and it was something that I ended up really enjoying. From the first achievement I got in Oblivion I was pretty much hooked on the system, at the same time I was enjoying the game far too much to actually care too much about achievements until I bought a few other 360 release titles, Call of Duty 2 if I remember right. From then on I alternated between spending time exploring Oblivion and playing Call of Duty 2.

In CoD2 while I pretty much ignored achievements save for being excited when I got one for simply playing the game, it wasn't too long (well, it was longer than most games nowdays anyway) until I had actually completed the game at which point I still wanted to play it, which led to me looking through the achievements. I noticed there were a few that required me to play and beat the game on the higher difficulties, so with maybe alittle bit of hesitation but not much mainly because I hardly ever played games above the normal difficulty before the Xbox 360, I set out to try the harder difficulties. I can't exactly remember the name of the difficulty before Veteran but I don't remember it being too difficult and it took almost the same amount of time as it did for me to complete the game on normal, probably due to my previous knowledge of where all of the enemies would spawn and such. So with that, I ended up getting my achievement and still loving the game, that's when I had the idea to go onto Veteran mode to get the final achievements, however as I found out, Veteran was the most punishing experience I did then, and it still probably is.

I specifically remember the start of one mission where the player and their allies gets ambushed, unfortunately the time between getting out of the ambush zone to safe cover isn't scripted or a safe zone, and enemies could definitely shoot you, that fact paired with the fact that on Veteran the enemy AI seemed to almost miss and instantly fire at you when you got out of cover, as well as throw grenades at you constantly when you weren't able to be shot made getting out of that first area probably the most repetitive, annoying, and frustrating experiences of my life. I would pretty much take 3 steps and then die, and then try different things and then die, and I even tried to fire back once and then died anyway, but eventually I managed to get to a check point and thanked goodness for it. In the end however, no matter how frustrating it actually was, I managed to beat the campaign on Veteran and above all of the other times I played through Call of Duty 2 that playthrough was probably the most satisfying.

In the Elder Scrolls part of the story, there weren't that many achievements that I wasn't able to get mainly because I did wanted to do pretty much everything from the start, even the Dark Brotherhood quests which were clearly evil and I normally don't do evil things in games but I decided to do it first so I could get it out of the way and think of the rest of the game as my character redeeming themselves. The main part however is that all of the achievements were tied to getting to either ranking up in a faction which you do simply by completing the particular faction's quests, or gotten from progressing to a certain point in the main story, the game itself was very compelling for me to play and Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion probably remains the most pleasant and easiest game to get all of the achievements for.

That also gave me kind of a wrong mindset about achievements however, and while this was after I already completed Call of Duty 2 on Veteran I had thought that achievements couldn't get much harder, so I went onto playing and renting other games to see if I could max them out. The first game that I had problems getting all of the achievements on was Perfect Dark Zero mainly because I never could get used to how the gun play was, it felt too floaty compared to what I was used to in like Call of Duty or even Oblivion, infact I think I prefer Oblivion's bow mechanics to PDZ's gunning. That isn't to say that it was bad however , I still managed to put up with it to get through the story on normal, I tried it on harder difficulties but I just didn't like the game enough. On the other hand, there were also achievements that could be gained through playing multiplayer matches with bots, but those achievements also asked for a great deal of things such as 1000 flag captures or 1000 kills with a gun, it made getting those achievements very repetitive, and I never was able to finish it as my first 360 broke before then, and I lost all of my progress with the achievements, so I just sold the game and moved on.

The real breaker of achievement hunting for me was Ghost Recon : Advanced Warfighter, where it had an achievement to be ranked on the top of the global leader boards for various game modes. I knew that I never would be able to do that even when I heard about people who would trade boosting their scores to get that high, I simply didn't want to bother with it, and it didn't take much thought to just forget about GRAW's achievements in general. Since then there have been a few other games that have had similar achievements, as well as even more achievements that I don't like such as in Team Fortress 2 where you have to kill a enemy doing a taunt, normally no one will ever taunt in a position that allows them to be killed, I've played the game about 30 hours so far according to Steam Stats and not once did I kill a enemy while they were doing their taunt.

Despite all of that I still enjoy achievement hunting quite a bit. When I went back to WoW during Wrath of the Lich King I was very pleased to find out that WoW had adapted an achievement system at well, in fact a lot of my time at level 80 involved me doing achievements. So while there are some achievements and I don't try to complete a entire game's achievements often anymore, achievements are still fairly enjoyable and I do them when I can.

Singular Thoughts - Current Generation vs Last Generation

Browsing through forums over the years made me see more than just a few interesting things, one of those things that came to mind that I've seen a lot more than just recently is the argument of the current generation of gaming against the last generation. More appropriate figures would be the Xbox period of time (Last gen) against the Xbox 360 period of time (Current gen). With this argument in mind, that's what I'd like to talk about in this post.

While I'm sure a lot of people have argued for or against the Current Gen in this situation, there hasn't been a lot of people that actually have had convincing arguments against the Current Gen. In fact I really haven't seen any argument other than one : “The Current generation of gaming is all about graphics” and usually that's where the argument ends. That argument suggests that this generation of gaming sacrifices everything else for improved graphics, to which I personally and respectfully disagree.

Graphics are definitely the first thing most people look at, since it is for the most part the only visual thing to look at (other things to look at arguably are things such as text, or menu design), and in general it has improved the most significantly above the last generation of gaming, despite that, there are many new features in games nowdays that you didn't really see at all in the last generation. The most direct comparisons in this argument would come from sequels where the goal is to not only provide the next chapter of a series but also to improve it all around, there have been many more than just a few series that have been on both the current gen and the last gen, here are a few that come to mind.

Halo

Last Gen - Halo : Combat Evolved, Halo 2

Current Gen - Halo Reach, Halo 3, Halo 3 : ODST

From the last gen the Halo series hasn't really changed too much. It has improved on graphics, but for the most part it has kept what made Halo popular in the first place, which of course makes sense since for a lot of people it was the game that showed that the consoles can do shooters just as well, if not better by perspective, to people. There are many minor things that have been added to the series from the last generation however, such as the ability to have 4 player cooperative play, and the addition of 2 new characters for the third and fourth player in Halo 3. Dual wielding has come and gone as well, it is still around but there are different opinions amongst the development team about it. Halo 3 ODST of course also had the Firefight mode which wasn't in any Halo games previously to it. Finally it's technical fine tuning blows the last generation out of the water with nearly non-existent loading times save for a few to start the game up, and a now standardized but unique to the current gen menu system.

So with all of that said, I believe the Halo series has definitely improved on graphics but it remained the same, thus almost being the same experience as it was on the last gen.

Call of Duty

Last Gen – Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty : Big Red One, Call of Duty : Finest Hour

Current Gen – Call of Duty 3, Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare, Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty : World at War, Call of Duty : Black Ops

The Call of Duty series without a doubt has improved significantly in almost every way from the last generation to our current one. The first is graphics, Call of Duty 2's graphics were very good for it's time, and it was even slightly seen in 3 and 4, but in the end the series has improved on graphics greatly from then on, into games such as World at War, and Modern Warfare 2, and basically every Call of Duty game past 3. In regards to game play, the series has become more faster paced, but it also retained the feeling of Call of Duty 2 with things like tight controls that reacted very quickly, and recharging health; at the same time however with the complete change of setting that Modern Warfare took the series, it's guns still carried the same controls, but felt completely different with the change from bolt action rifles to fully automatic assault rifles. The story telling of the series has also changed with the games featuring high octane and thrilling campaigns rather than a more long journey that was seen more in the last gen, this is probably also the double bladed sword for the series however as the long campaign that was in past games was also very interesting, and fun to play through, at the same time being nearly 2 or 3 times as long as many of the current games in the series. The tone of both generation's games are noticeably different as well, with the current favoring a long lasting effect but quick and strong hit more akin to the duration of a movie rather than the last generation's memorable adventure. Finally, the multiplayer has dramatically improved as well mainly in selection, while in the last gen console gamers really only had Finest Hour, now every CoD game has expansive multiplayer which again has improved by implementing player advancement systems and unlocks as well as in game changes such as killing streak bonuses, however the game play modes for the most part other than war in CoD3/WaW have remained the same.

My final deduction is that the Call of Duty series has improved all around off Call of Duty 2, but it has added many things that completely separate current titles from 2 from the new change of scenery and graphics to story telling and additional game play modes.

Grand Theft Auto

Last Gen – Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto : Vice City, Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas

Current Gen – Grand Theft Auto 4 and DLC expansions

Both generations have kept the main principle of being a open world game with a story of crime in mind, but with that the current generation has vastly improved on that vision. The graphics between SA and GTA4 are almost indistinguishable with GTA4 coming out ahead and looking much better, while admittedly it's graphical power was hampered for details everywhere else, that hampering has always been a part of the GTA series. With that aside, GTA 4 looks fantastic, it easily lives up to and rivals most current gen games. In terms of game play, the gun play in GTA 4 is much easier to use than it ever was in any GTA game, while locking on is still much easier than manually aiming, the improvements on the manual aiming system makes it usable if the player desires to use it. Handling of cars and other vehicles in GTA 4 has also improved in a number of ways from the different feels and handling of cars themselves, to the feel of the car when it's applied to the realistic weight of the world with GTA 4's engine. While that aspect is not the greatest for doing things that require precise exact handling (which is rare) it's unique enough to enjoy which helps in overcoming the challenge to adapt to it. The story telling of GTA4 also separates itself from the past entries of the series, while the GTA series originally had a very overdramatic portrayal of crime life, GTA 4 features more normal characters than the rest of the series, although this story telling way is slightly seen in GTA: SA, it is really emphasized in 4 with the main character and the rest of the cast, yet at the same time it isn't changed deeply enough to have a huge difference, I personally thought it was very similar to the past GTA games until I thought about it. Finally multiplayer, while definitely not the high light feature of GTA 4, it has competitive multiplayer and cooperative modes that the series originally did not.

Overall I believe the GTA series has gone a long way, like I said while it's kept it's original principles of being an open world game at heart, the power of the current generation really allowed it to really push those principles much further.

With these 3 popular series as examples, I believe there's more than enough things over than the improvement of graphics for the current gen to be the next step up from the last gen. There's also many more examples of games that have improvements such as these, and while not every game is great, for the most part many games of the current gen are many steps ahead of their predecessors, and I for one, hope that they continue this way to forever have something better than the last.*

*also in the future I may be doing more compare and contrasts of the last and current generation.