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
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.
I'm starting to get tired of these inane "musings" posts.
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.
I'm starting to get tired of these inane "musings" posts.
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.
We haven't seen a major push from AAA studios to create real singleplayer content realistically for decades.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
...... 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.
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?"
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.
these bastards is to start making a push for catering to casuals and console players a lot more
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.