I know there will be some more organic titles like Helldivers 2 getting popular and of course the much loved Deep Rock Galactic. I wonder though if we're going to see more and more co-op based stuff being pushed as devs seem completely uninterested in trying to solve the issues of multiplayer games if they can't retain control of the playerbase. The co-op genre by itself I don't have a problem with, I'm just not that interested in it.
Seems that the next logical conclusion for these bastards is to start making a push for catering to casuals and console players a lot more and pump out boring online only co-op scenarios that aren't remotely challenging and then proceed to spam microtransactions in peoples' faces. My reasoning for this is that it gives players something 'new' to try and they don't even have to worry about all of the problematic stuff like balance or hacking that often comes with more competitive based titles.
This makes sense to me, but it's so damn cringe because it's the safe and easy option and bores me to death. More and more it's becoming clear that AAA studios are simply not interested in catering to gamers who want to be challenged because it's too much of a challenge for them to make something good.
TLDR: Smol pp AAA studios are pussying out of the overall gaming market to cater to normie console peasants by trying to normalise co-op gaming and avoid all other genres.
I'm starting to get tired of these inane "musings" posts.
Now co-op actually getting traction again after years of stagnation is some insane conspiracy? Normal gamers who have friends and siblings have lamented the loss of things like splitscreen gameplay for years. Co-op making a surge is hardly some conspiracy, if anything it's something to be celebrated.
I'm not a huge co-op person but plenty of my friends, their friends, and my siblings friends are.
Yeah, companies will take advantage of it if it gets popular, but they take advantage of everything that can get popular, that's just their nature as corporations.
Just because co-op games aren't for you, that doesn't mean they're intended to ruin the fucking game industry through some absurd casualization nonsense (and on that note, games like Dark Souls have had co-op multiplayer since the beginnings of their franchises). I think you're just out of touch with what a lot of regular people want in their games. A lot of people like having fun with their friends in games. For some it's multi-player, others it's co-op, and some it's both. Gaming has been a social experience since the early days when people would crowd around arcade machines, and co-op has been a thing for at least 3, if not possibly 4 decades in gaming. It's really not hard to figure out.
As someone who games to avoid people I agree with this. If I'm going to play with someone I'd rather it be a friend or a sibling than Chinky Chan's cheat program.
Yeah. I'm not one of OP's haters, but it's getting a bit much, even for me. I get having a passion, but he gets upset about the weirdest stuff, too. And then presents it as something everyone else should get involved with or something too.
There are such things as trends, and when one game hits it big there will be mimics. That has been going on as long as there are video games. We've had a few big coop hits recently, so we'll probably see more coop games trying to ride the wave. It's not a psyop. And we also had eras where coop was big in the past, too, such as Left 4 Dead going big.
It's not like this forum is bursting with content each day so if someone wants to share random thoughts about whatever, I say go for it. It's easy enough to hide the thread and move on if it isn't interesting.
Just a gut feeling, but it feels like the majority of them are from Lethn.
This is exactly why I brought up Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic as viable co-op games even if I personally don't like it all that much. The rest of the titles that are going to keep inevitably popping up? They're just cash grabs through monetisation. Aside from maybe stuff like Manor Lords and Kingdom Come deliverance that are both indie titles. We haven't seen a major push from AAA studios to create real singleplayer content realistically for decades. If they do any kind of singleplayer it's always some crappy walking simulator that can barely count as a game.
Suicide Squad and Redfall are just as (not)-playable in single player as in squad co-op. Starfield is single player only. The God of War Games are single player. TLOU 2 was single player. Dead Space Remake and RE4 Remake were single player. Zelda TOTK is single player. Pokemon is primarily single player. Mario is singleplayer. Hogwarts Legacy is singleplayer. Dead Island 2 is primarily single player.
Everything FromSoft makes is primarily single player. Stellar Blade is single player. I don't think Atomic Heart was AAA, but it's single player and got hype.
Single player games are absolutely still being made. You just forgot all of them.
I should state I don't play Nintendo games at all so I'm primarily looking at the PC gaming market, I don't do consoles. I feel like looking at most of the titles singleplayer is simply tacked on as an optional afterthought. As for the other games you've listed, Hogwarts Legacy yes, Dead Island 2 also yes and Atomic Heart but you're right I think that's more classed as an indie game. It did pretty well considering and was very much like a bioshock style experience.
The other titles you list are old as fuck though lets be real by current standards because let's not forget we're in 2024 now and I don't really even bother counting the 're-masters/re-makes' as new games and I'm not interested in paying £60 or whatever ridiculous price they've tacked on to play an old game again. Yes I know some will be different to a degree but meh.
Also why even mention Starfield? I definitely don't count broken woke cancer as a legitimate video game reeeee.
So… you’ve arbitrarily disqualified over half the examples given (you said ‘decades,’ but the GoW stuff is too old? Or maybe it was Elden Ring snd Armored Core you meant with that?), then still admit to three titles (which is more than the two you have)? You want an AAA game, but you also don’t count anything that’s a woke, shallow game with a buggy release (i.e. almost all of AAA?)
I mean, I could find you even more titles (Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man 2, Far Cry 6, Like a Dragon: Isshin, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth), but they’d all fall under at least one of your arbitrary disqualifications.
If you want to say “the only games I think are ‘good,’ on the one platform I pay attention to, are co-op,” thst would be one thing. But you said “the industry isn’t making any of these games,” and you’re just… really, really wrong.
It's not arbitrary in the slightest, many of the titles you list are just repackaged console exclusives to call those releases is an insult to any indie dev that puts the slightest bit of effort into their title even if it's just a little side scroller platformer they whipped up for fun.
I want an AAA game that was on par with the titles of old where you could get properly excited about a release and take the whole day off to play it. Remember how amazing Mass Effect was even if they borked Mass Effect 3 badly? That's the standard I hold them to. It's even worse when you examine most of these newer titles and you realise they're almost certainly copy-pasting code and just plonking slightly updated assets into everything.
Yakuza and Baldur's Gate 3 are pretty much one of the only ones I'd count as games that cater to a true singleplayer experience. Even Baldur's Gate 3 though clearly had co-op quite heavily in mind and I can make that argument. They at least made it so that you weren't hamstrung in the experience if you did decide to go solo and allowed for proper offline play.
The issue is that your contention in your original post was that there is “an artificial push for co-op happening,” and that they are trying to “avoid all other genres.” My point is that that’s provably untrue, because look at all these other games being made.
I agree that most of the games I mentioned are mediocre at best, but that’s not the point. The point is that their existence, the fact that lots of dev time, marketing campaigns, and billions of dollars are going into these largely non co-op games blows your point completely out of the water. I don’t care how much you defend your point with “but those games are disappointing,” because that’s not the debate here. The debate is: “are big publishers still making non co-op games,” and the answer is: “unequivocally, yes!”
You're massively misconstruing what I've been posting as have others, the singleplayer games you've mentioned if you're being honest simply cannot be counted as brand new games because they're repackaged versions of old games. In a lot of cases these games didn't even necessarily need a re-make because they weren't that unplayable to begin with. It's a bit like looking at Bioshock 1 and going, yeah let's do it again and make it a 100gb install size with some hd textures and charge £60 for it. No, come on, same deal with the bullshit Mass Effect legendary edition.
Yes I'm aware I'm being hyperbolic with my point because they did put real effort into some titles that is to repeat 'some' but in a lot of cases they haven't.
Recognizing a potential market is not the same thing as artificially creating said market. If it somehow leads to a bubble, it'll pop, big deal. That's their problem if that's the case.
Multiplayer games in general have the potential to be infinite income vortexes, as companies have figured out. That has a lot more to do with the games as a service model and the nature of online multiplayer games in general though rather than just co-op.
As for singleplayer, there are western AAA companies that try to make singleplayer content... they usually just suck dogshit at it, and are also often pozzed and not worth supporting. (Unless by "real" you mean quality, which is more of a cultural and talent problem than a lack of intent to create the content in question).
I haven't played in quite a while, but the most DRG had was a handful of cosmetic bundles right? Nothing impactful, no premium battlepass shit, and they kept doing free expansions. Just a one time purchase of $30.
Helldivers is AA. DRG maybe not even that. Ghost Ship got acquired and their parent was also acquired but they're a 32 person company now. I believe they were smaller at launch.
You think it's artificial because you don't like it?
There should be room for all kinds of games, but you need to stop worrying about AAA. They won't ever have what you want.
Oh I accepted a long time ago that they're never going to make the sorts of games I want to play anymore. I've just seen this behaviour before from back in the old days where games studios start thinking that they can reach an audience that doesn't exist and it's going to bankrupt them.
I wouldn't say co-op games are a safe bet. I remember COUNTLESS ones that failed. I remember some Resident Evil on that flopped hard where you played either Umbrella operatives or US military guys, there was the few EA tacked onto their games trying to copy ME3 multiplayer success. AC Unity I think had a co-op and they seemed to drop multiplayer all together after that..
I don't think it's a co-op push, it's more AAA are desperately trying to copy ANYTHING successful because they don't have the talent to think of anything new.
Absolutely.
"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own." -- Tolkien, The Return of the King
...... what? Seriously, what? Co-op is not a genre. It's never been a genre, and never will be a genre. Or are we saying that Left 4 Dead, 7 Days to Die and Project Zomboid are all basically the same game since they all are co-op and all have zombies in them?
And, no, I'm not being pedantic here - you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what co-op is. Co-op is not a type of game. Co-op is an implementation. Helldivers 2, Palword, Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo 4 are all co-op games released in the past year and they are all vastly different games. Co-op games can be easy. Co-op games can be difficult. The co-op could be necessary, or optional. You even have weird pseudo-co-op stuff like the pawn system in the Dragon's Dogma games.
If you want to complain about cash-grabbing devs and MTX, feel free. But co-op has nothing to do with that. Blizzard spammed D4 with a huge number of MTX, both cosmetic and gameplay. Fatshark stuck a ton of MTX in Vermintide and Darktide, but those are mostly cosmetic and have no impact at all on the difficulty. Larian and PocketPair didn't put any MTX in BG3 or Palword. And you'll find a similar spread in any video game, single or multiplayer.
And saying having co-op means a game is inherently not challenging is just ignorant.
Not artificial, just cyclical. There have been several popular co-op games recently and the industry follows trends.
But you're missing the elephant in the room. Streaming. Co-op games are ripe for streamer cross-pollination. Streamers are incentivized to play together because it potentially grows their individual followings. By giving them a game to do that within, you can pull a lot of eyes to your game. Friendly fire fits with the theme of Helldivers 2, but it also creates fertile ground for clipable and memeable moments which spreads awareness of the game. It's free marketing.
It's not unique to co-op. Party games and social competitive stuff like Among Us also can target this niche.
Another thing too is that coop games, when successful, can lead to (very loosely) 4x profits simply because you can get entire groups of friends buying a game in bunches.
I feel like Borderlands set the trend for this, given how they ended up selling Steam-bundles based on that idea.
Arghh yes that explains the push for 4 players and why they seem to refuse to cater to more 2 player content.
Maybe. But if you've ever tried to get a group of > 4 friends together to play a game, you know that is gets exponentially difficult to find open windows. If you want an 8-man co-op, you basically need a static group with scheduled playing times. 3-4 you can manage with a "anyone want to play?"
Even with 3 - 4 people it can be a struggle, I do miss the old days of local gaming where it was just a matter of getting 4 friends on a couch. I feel like online 2 player would be a much better experience. Faster to do matchmaking and it's less of an issue if the gameplay is based around 2 players or they at least design scenarios to work for bother.
No, I don't think it's artificial, I think most real world people want more games that enable playing cooperatively with other people after society has killed off most of the real world opportunities.
co-op looks to be successful. Once they see that they are going to run it in to the ground.
Aren't they already doing that with most games? Games get easier and easier. I was recently playing Dark Envoy and the hard mode was easier then I would expected normal to be. It also had 3 easier difficulty levels.
If you are a soy drinking diversity hire who has been told that any negative experience is genocide then you get the modern gaming where the difficulty of finishing a game is boredom.
Even the easiest level is too hard for game journalists, which is why they keep getting easier. They want a push to win button so they spend an hour writing about how racist and sexist the game is and spend the other 39 hours of their workweek watching tranny porn.
I can't say I blame any dev if that is the route they want to go. Competitive multiplayer is cancer thanks to all of the cheaters, and cheaters are inevitable as long as Chinese cocksuckers have access to the internet.
If we are lucky, maybe this will kill the whole matchmaking fad and let us host our own servers again like the good old days.
But how else will they get government money for spying on us if they allowed private hosting?
there is an artificial push for online-only games
because that way you own nossing and the company you paid money to controls your "product"
Playing Elden Ring with Seamless coop or Fallout New Vegas with the multiplayer mod with some friends is some of the coolest gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
Fun co-op is one of the things Nintendo gets that a lot of the shittier game developers take for granted:
How does VATS work with multiplayer? Is it just disabled?
Yeah there’s no Vats and you get disconnected a lot and quest progress doesn’t sync but other than that it’s a blast, especially with mods like DUST.
Co-op is making a resurgence because people have realized that they don’t actually enjoy being forced to play games with spergs like you, Lethn. I would never play a competitive game against strangers online because I don’t hate myself.
People who don't like co-op are usually just revealing that they have no friends to play with and feel personally attacked by that being held up to them.
Nothing artificial about it. I’d love more co-op games. I don’t want to play PvP with my friends, and even in the days that I did we had plenty of games and ways to avoid the sweat and grind of a modern PvP game. It’s very difficult to chill and screw around in a modern PvP game unless you like burning most of your time in pre and post game stuff watching the suck my dick emotes they paid real money for then sitting in a lobby for 15mins for all this click ready shit, then half the games you gotta go to a warmup area then fly in and parachute, it goes on and on.
Haven’t tried Helldivers, but I played through all of Outlast Trials with a friend and despite being a tough horror game it was a blast.
It's better than post-op games.
This has to be some of the most retarded sperging you've done. I've occasionally run searches for coop games over the years, and there has been a substantial DROP in the last 2-4 years. And they're something that AAA studios have rarely ever chased. And I just did another search, barely anything worth mentioning that's come out in the last year, save for obviously Helldivers 2 and BG3.
You know what trends AAA studios chase a lot? 3rd person shooters. Hero shooters. Battle Royales. MMORPG's (less so in recent years). Call of Duty clones. Casual "playing house" types of games. MOBA's. Minecraft stylized shovelware. And maybe not AAA studios, but there have certainly been a fuckton of sidescrollers and pixel-graphics games. As well as clones of games that appeal to mobile markets.
And now we have multiple Stray-like trends coming out, where you also run around as a cat. (Which admittedly, I don't find entirely unappealing, but it is a fantastic example of the silliness that happens when trends influence creativity.)
It's not sperging in the slightest, I bring this up because their multiplayer games are tanking hard, they're going to have to bring something out to replace it or go bankrupt.
That's a fair possibility. Might've been better to lead with that rather than calling it a new trend this early in the whole thing.
You're probably right.
I would argue that Fallout 76 could have been a full priced co-op DLC to Fallout 4, and it would have been much better received.
But then they couldn't control the way you play, force you to make an account, tuck an in game shop in there, maintain control over what goes on in the game via the servers, make a private session pay to use for you and your friends, if it was just drop in drop out co-op.
In fact, it seemed like they did everything in their power to specifically add in as many barriers as possible, and then make you pay to convenience your way out, or have to work harder than someone who paid.
If going back to co-op means an end to the above, I'm fine with that.
This is the thing, co-op I get as a genre, but the other stuff I'm baffled by, you're right about Fallout 76. It could have been a much better release as a genuine co-op rather than the shamelessly tacked on multiplayer live service they put together.
I like co-op games done well. Few are.
Deep Rock Galactic is one of the very few games I bought in the last decade+. Good price. Lots of fun if you like that gameplay. The 4 classes are all well defined and useful.
Tons of silly fun details in the space rig. Fun / goofy holyday events too.
Everything gameplay-related has zero microtransaction. Tons of cosmetics in the base game. All cosmetics can be randomly found during missions eventually. Any microtransaction is more a sort of "here is a tip to the devs for adding another season" ( new seasonal stuff is part of the game you already bought ).
Edit : I found a release date for season 5. June 13th 2024.
P.S. : You can even play DRG offline.
I suspect at least some of the push for adding online content is to combat piracy. At least in my case, there are a handful of games I purchased legit copies of for the purpose of accessing the online features.