The Family Hunt for Cooperative Games

It’s extremely easy, after more than two decades playing games, to get into a bit of a pattern. In the last 10 years that pattern is increasingly, for me, built around competitive or cooperative multiplayer. Yet, despite the amount of time that this trend has sustained itself, the experiences that exist all fall into well tread and familiar genres. Overwhelmingly we get shooters. There is, of course, other game types that work in this kind of gameplay. I play a ton of Rocket League and currently my friends and I are really into Wreckfest, but those rarely pop up. It’s even rarer for them to be more than a flash in the pan experience for us. Vermintide, Call of Duty, Destiny, Halo. Those are the games that remain on the quickplay list. 

After a year of playing cooperative games with my family, we have all begun to notice that what we’re looking for, somehow, doesn’t exist. Now this may be a case of just not finding the right game, I will admit that. But that isn’t for lack of searching. In the last year alone we have, like a swarm of locusts, moved through Sea of Thieves, Vermintide, Deep Rock Galactic, some Destiny 2, Human Fall Flat, Overcooked 2, Anthem, Diablo III, Warframe, Star Wars Battlefront II, Astroneer, Darksiders Genesis, Elite Dangerous, Gears 5, Halo, Outriders, Remnant: From the Ashes, Star Wars Squadrons, and Wreckfest. Have we played all the way through all of those games? No, absolutely not. But we have given them all a good week, at least. What we keep encountering is, what I perceive as a few things.

First, and most egregious, there seems to be a shortage of games that incorporate cooperative play AND an in-depth way for players of differing skill levels to contribute. Playing with my mother and grandmother means that for most titles we need to give them space to learn the mechanics, grok the loop, and carve out their own niche in the space. Anthem is perhaps the best potential, but as we all know, lacks the coattails to keep us occupied past the campaign. A campaign that we are rapidly approaching the conclusion of, despite myriad progression issues. But jump into Battlefront for 30 minutes and without failure, the moms are complaining that they feel as if they are just cannon fodder, trampled over time and time again without much space to learn and contribute. 

The second pitfall we are actively trying to cross comes from a lack of persistent worlds and content. Sea of Thieves served us extremely well while we were digging through the stories. But those offerings are meager given our ravenous nature and within a month or so, we were looking for anything else to do. 

I understand that our situation is quite a bit different from what most gamers experience. We have a couple of players who are still in many ways cutting their teeth. That is an immediate roadblock for a lot of titles. But the moms aren’t helpless. More of than not they are full capable of holding their own, it’s just a matter of finding that title with a kind enough on-ramp.

Tutorialization is a huge conversation in games. There are so many different examples of good and bad that pointing to any singular example as best is a feckless gesture at best and just plain dumb at worst. This is most apparent in Anthem, a game with a satisfying enough loop and a great dynamic for team contribution. But try to figure out how exactly you can combo with your teammates and the systems are buried under a pile of text and counterintuitive menus that make even the most seasoned gamer roll their eyes and bury the face in their palm. 

Games like Halo and Destiny benefit from the years of FPS that the community at large has become familiar with. Point your gun, shoot at alien. Rinse wash repeat. But how do you tutorialize the loot cycle of Diablo III with two players who have never encountered a similar process? How do you help them navigate the dense menu system over Xbox chat?

The third and final gripe that my Ben and I have is: Why are there so few co-op offerings? Games are a communal endeavor. Playing with friends is paramount to so many studios. After all, make a game playable by more than one person together and you instantly increase your marketability. Why then are so many games only tow or three player co-op? The easy answer for this comes from the reality that game development is hard as fuck. I get that. I think our whole group gets that. Balancing a game so that four people can simultaneously interact with it is HARD. But there are enough games that do it that you start to wonder if Destiny and Gears limited their player cap to three not because they couldn’t swing it technically, but so players didn’t have to find three other friends to play with, just two. It feels like a strategic decision, not a capability roadblock. 

Over the last year, nearly every month, we find ourselves in the same place, asking the same questions. Where is OUR game? Where is the title that will fit us like a glove. I am holding out for the Ascent, the slick isometric shooter destined for Game Pass this summer. It looks like a blast, seems to allow four players to play, and appears to have a scalability in terms of difficulty that our group can mesh with easily. But who knows?

Imagine if Overcooked allowed you to lock in a difficulty setting, but still mix-up the menu. Allowing players to find their comfort zone and live in that pocket. Imagine if Diablo, one of the biggest (at least most recognizable) games in the world, allowed you to set it on beginner mode, allowing you to not worry about the grind and swap loot cycle (This is where I point out that I know that you can set gear to auto-equip, but that only slightly makes things better, especially in a game so dependent on builds). 

Our group is unique, three generations of family scrounging the bins for a game we can all play and enjoy, but the time is rapidly approaching that games are encountered by more and more players with differing skill levels and knowledge bases. 2020 was evidence of this. The adoption rate of games by a public suddenly out of this to do outside of the house was steep. We are only going to see more and more people come to games for release, entertainment and fellowship. Let’s start making games that build in a more comprehensive level of introduction and maintain a more persistent system of making sure differently skilled players have a way to contribute to their groups.