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 - Effective Game Demos

Something that I used to be a lot more excited and looked forward to until I shifted my attention towards more long lasting games (like World of Warcraft) were game demos. I primarily got my demos from Xbox magazine when their magazines came with a disc full of demos and I was always excited to play them simply because there was no advantage to not playing them especially if the game is at least somewhat interesting. If I remember right, one of my favorite games ever , Metal Arms : Glitch in the System came on a demo that I played, I first heard of it in the magazine before reading it where it was given a reward for being really good but hardly anyone heard of it or played it (including myself) and with that, I decided to give that a try. I remember the demo being excellent, and more importantly it showed that the game itself was pretty good and while it could only present one level, it gave me enough of an incentive to buy the game itself which I didn't regret at all. I ended up playing through the entire game and I loved it, while I don't remember much about playing it, I do remember that it was really fun and I was hoping that they would make a sequel to it sometime, but unfortunately that was years ago and nothing has been heard about the Metal Arms series since then.

In any case, I felt like the Metal Arms demo was what a effective demo should be , it definitely sold the game to me and I was happy to play it, in fact I replayed the demo a few times before that and still enjoyed it. Game demos have improved since then but they still carry the same goal to people : to provide a small taste to the player so that they will want more and end up buying the full game. This fact can be broken up into smaller features that a demo could have that will also increase the likability of the game and even the demo itself. Here's a few demos that I've played and then I also bought the full version of, thanks to the game's demo.

-Time Splinters 2

-Psi-ops The Mind Gate Conspiracy

-The Suffering 2 (which I didn't actually buy but I liked the demo)

-Geometry Wars

-Feeding Frenzy

-Puzzle Quest

-Dead Rising

-Time Spliters : Future Perfect (I think)

-Red Faction : Guerilla

All of which I had fun in the full game, however all of these demos were released at different time periods and demoing has evolved quite a bit since the discs on Xbox magazine. Demos nowdays are primarily (at least for me) downloaded through Xbox Live, Playstation Network, or on the PC, various sites like Steam or Fileplanet. the easy accessibility led to a lot of variety as well and that caused somewhat of a backfire, now looking for demos is almost similar to shopping for a actual game. While you still can download anything you want at no cost, I found myself not wanting to try out most demos because of their description, title, or cover or a number of reasons along the lines where as I would try pretty much everything on the Xbox magazine demo disc. With that said, the advancement of technology is still there, and it has give demos even more power.

A very good cliff hanger ending of a demo I've played although I forget what demo it was at the moment was at the end of the level and the end of level cut scene it transitioned from a good camera pan of the action to a barrel of a gun, leading to a trailer of “buy the full game”(basically). While that might be annoying to some, I thought it was definitely a great transition rather than a black out and then putting the player back onto the start up screen. That same demo also had a problem with that however as it played the exact same trailer when you actually quit the game to go back to the Xbox “home”, I believe that it was skippable however.

Another benefit that demos can have is the inclusion of full game benefits. The main one that comes to most people's minds when it comes to benefits such as those are demo saves that carry onto the full game. It's been a problem for demos for a very long time, and it even persists now that no matter how much fun you've had in the demo, chances are the demo was the first or second level in the game, and when you play the actual game you'll end up repeating it. To that end, a few games have created a way to allow demo saves to carry onto the full game, allowing you to keep all of the progress that you've made without having to rehash any of it in the actual game, this is probably more of a convenience addition rather than a true hindrance but every sprinkle of additions help make demos more appealing to players.

Finally, and while this isn't only including new demos, a very effective way that doesn't require any of the things stated before at all would be to have the demo set in a completely different setting that is unique to the demo that serves the purpose to give people a taste of gameplay mechanics, and if the developer is up to it, even a taste of the game's story by adding in small bits of story that would be part of the main story. I've only played one game “demo” that has done this which is Dead Rising 2 : Case Zero, and it also was priced. However I believe it very much fit all of the criterias for a demo in that it let the player get their hands on the game before it was released setting up for players to buy the game on release, it allowed players to actually play and see pretty much every general game mechanic and even allowed the player a small taste of the workbench system that it had, but it kept many things you would normally be able to create with the work bench in the full game only. Lastly, it had a save system that allowed you to take your character onto the full game, you had a low level limitation of course, but you kept all of your levels up to that point and money that you've obtained. While Case Zero was priced, it still my ideal of a demo maybe even too well to actually be considered a small game especially since it had a price tag, but with that aside, it is probably one of the best game demos I've played in my life.

With all of that said, I believe game demos are still very interesting, and they remain a free (mostly) way to try out a game before you actually buy it, and even with that small minor point in mind, developers strive to make their demos better and better.