Kurgan on 19/4/2006 at 05:01

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Co-op Thief is a very cool and, amazingly, controversial subject. The subject came up, once again, in another thread, and we sorta accidentally hijacked that one, so apologies to [NAUC]Chief for that little oops, and here's a new thread to keep everything on-topic. :)

Ok, allow me to recap the gist of it (although, if you'd like to see previous posts and argu- er, I mean, discussions, look (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105446) here).

For all intent and purpose, there are two forms of multiplayer (referred to as MP afterwards), Tactical (deathmatch, team-versus-team, capture the flag, etc) and Co-op.

Tactical MP allows multiple players to play together, but only post-game, so to speak, using either "maps" from the original game, or new ones created by fans. It does not allow the players to actually play the original game, just as if playing single-player, together.

Co-op MP is primarily focused on allowing for a single-player experience to be shared by multiple players, who work together to achieve the goals, experience the story, solve the mystery, and so on. Just like the single-player, out-of-the-box session, but with friends joining you, and no human-controlled characters working against you.

Tactical MP currently rules the field, something I'm forever complaining about. :) Games like Thievery have attempted to give us co-op Thief, but even that one has lost support for co-op play, and is primarily used for tactical MP gaming these days.

This thread is intended for us to discuss true co-op MP, to point out its merits, its flaws, and how it can be realistically included in future TTCs (total Thief conversions) or other games, as well as show those that create these games that some of us still desire it, and are willing to assist in any way that's needed, even if that's just giving feedback on ideas for implementation or possible problems. That's the overt reason for this. The not-so-subtle secondary reason for this is to help promote the idea and breath a little new life into it. <Chuckle> What many of us wouldn't give to see a few new designers creating missions for coop MP mods, be it established games like Thievery, forthcoming TTCs like Dark Mod or Shadow: Source, or even Thief-like missions for non-Thief entities like Sven Co-op under Half-Life.

Thief 3 originally promised to give us co-op play (or at least tactical MP, --I took it to mean full co-op support at the time, but could have been mistaken), but that was dropped along the way. Sucks to be us. From what I'm told, it's virtually impossible to create a MP patch for Thief or Thief 2, but if it isn't, I'd pay to see it done. Imagine being able to co-op play all the existing T2 FMs??? To be honest, I'm still happy with Thievery, and would love to see new "missions" created for it that can live-up to FM standards, but map designers are few and far between for it these days.

So, have at thee, citizens! Add yer thoughts on the subject, be they pro, con, or just whimsical. And remember, Benny would want you to. ;)

demagogue on 19/4/2006 at 06:54

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Except that "good" coop should be designed with that purpose in mind ... so that every player feels engaged throughout the game and the flow of the plot takes MP into account (I'm not criticising your description Domarius, just elaborating on it). And it isn't necessarily that each PC is a cloned copy of the other PCs. It might work better if there is space for some level of specialization among PCs, or even differentiated goals ... not necessarily adversarial, but different shades of grey in alliegencies (like the backstory to Strange Bedfellows, Hammerites and thieves working together, but not necessarily in the same way or for the same reasons).

I would really like to see a push in the direction of true coop, too, but I don't have any illusions about the challenges to making it sustainably work and not degenerating over time towards the tactical end a la Thievery. BTW, I don't mean "degenerating" pejoritavely. I like tactical gameplay a lot. I just mean it in the sense of coop maps changing over time to being treated like tactical maps, something that at least the author didn't originally intend. I tend to think of coop gameplay and tactical gameplay as two totally different beasts, one is not "better" or "worse" than another, and BOTH are fun for their own reasons (for the persons that like that style. I like both. Other people like one but not the other, and that's fine because it's just personal preference), and as far as I'm concerned the two wouldn't have anything in common at all except for one important thing: They both require a set of fans ready to come together to play the maps. And that raises the main issue as I see it:

The problem with coop maps is that they just aren't capable of sustaining a regular crowd to play them. They are more like 1-shot deals; you play the map and then it's done. The problem with that is it's hard to pull a bunch of people together just to play one map (and you don't even know how long it will take to do the map, maybe the whole thing is over in 10 mintues, maybe it will take 6 hours, how do you plan for that?). And after that, the whole thing is over... There's nothing regular to keep the crowd together. And if a regular crowd does develop, nobody can blame them for starting to treat the map like a tactical map, since they've already been through the plot and don't need to be hampered by story now; and if it's fun for them to play it tactical style, who would dare try to stop them? Let them do what they want!

But this doesn't bode well for fans of coop style gameplay. The only real kind of solution I could think of, I mentioned in the other thread: The only way you're going to sustain a regular crowd for coop gameplay that I can see is if you also have a regular series of maps coming out on a regular basis that tell a story episodically (TV like), but that would be very demanding on the author's side; you'd literally need a stable of authors to keep the story going and making new maps on a regular basis which would be too demanding to do it right, at least on a non-commercial basis, because you'd need to be *very* regular to have any chance of keeping a regular crowd.

But short of that, I can't see coop gameplay being much more than a kind of novelty map, something you play on an ad hoc basis with your brothers, neighbors, or friends that happen to be right with you as Domarius mentioned. But maybe that's all coop gameplay is meant to be anyway, in which case there really isn't a debate to be had. Coop maps will come out, a few people will play them in the intended coop style on an ad hoc basis, and they'll have fun doing it while it lasts and that's that -- and the tactical gameplay fans might use the same map to replay over and over in a tactical fashion and let them have it if they're having fun. Maybe that's all there is to say about it. Anyway, it's not such a bad way to let things go on if that's the way things will turn out.

demagogue on 19/4/2006 at 07:33

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Sorry, I was editing my post while you posted that.

I realized after I posted that that I didn't word it well. I wasn't trying to say that what you mentioned wasn't true coop gameplay (things like cloned-PCs, etc); of course it is. I was just elaborating on your post to mention other features that one might want to say are also in the coop world as well.

Soul Shaker on 19/4/2006 at 09:08

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Ever thought on how hard it is to get co-op working these days? Each map must be designed around co-op and single player. Back in say, Doom 2, that was all well and good, it was a classic kill everyone is sight, and plot was barely taken into account. Now, expectations have rised, and so games have had to drop co-op to meet them. If you're gonna mod it in, I'm behind you all the way, but, for the long run, it isn't a realistic goal these days. It works in games that are specifically MP-designed, but, then again, humans are much more fun and unpredictable to play against than AI, so it's also lost it's appeal there. Expectations have taken it down. People want a gripping story, believable characters etc, and if the character is controlled by another human it just loses it's whole character. MMORPG's, however, they rarely have a story that's worthwhile to go through again and again. And, if they do, it's gonna cost you. It's time vs money, and money is usually short, or people are just clawing the developers.

Imagine how long it would take to implement co-op in Doom 3 or Quake 4? People were already hanging for the game and just couldn't take it much longer, so they scrapped co-op.

But, then again, through a little mod, someone added co-op play, although, it just loses the immersion. You won't really get a good co-op these days, and thief is just a game not designed for MP.

sparhawk on 19/4/2006 at 10:43

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Somehow this distinction of Tactical MP vs. Co-Op MP feels rather arbitrary and doesn't really serve a purpose because to my mind it is essentially the same. If you have a co-op map and play it with others, the only distinction would be that you have only computer controlled AI against you, while on a tactical map you would have other players. That is what it makes completely arbitrary to me. If you had extremly sophisticiated AI so that you could not distinguish them from human players, or on the other hand, have totally dumb human players so that you would be inclined to think they are AI, then your definition of the map would suddenly change even though you play the same map? That doesn't seem to be a good definition to me then.

Multiplayer is by definition about multiple players and it doesn't really matter wether there is AI involved or not because any AI can easily be replaced by a human player or vice versa. So to get to a usefull description, it would be better to define these terms in of the gameplay mechanics.

To my understanding the major difference between a co-op and mp game would be the story. Standard MP games don't have a story because they don't need one, while a co-op game is centered around a story that multiple players try to cooperatively beat. Again it doesn't matter wether the enemy is AI or not.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if there even is a really usefull definition of co-op vs. mp.