Co-op campaigns are a rarity these days, and that should change

As I've aged, my interest in competitive multiplayer games has waned. I find that I have no interest in fighting other players online, that I don't really care about the score I get, and that having those things present in a game tends to pair me up with players I'd rather not play with. At the same time, my interest in PvE and Co-Op games has grown substantially. While recent games have been rather good on the PvE front, they're lacking in co-op campaigns. And I wish that wasn't the case. Many modern games feature stories that lend themselves particularly well to having a "squad" of Protagonists; rarely is your character alone in any of the missions. Yet, nearly all of these games won't allow you to replace one of your AI squadmates with a real flesh and blood human.

Co-op is a rather recent invention

We can call this the "history" section of the article. Back in the sixth generation of game consoles (Xbox, PS2, GameCube) was really when we saw the beginnings of true co-op, and they were all offline affairs. I wasn't aware of any games having meaningful online co-op at the time, and didn't play them. But this wasn't a terribly big deal, online play was almost exclusively for things like deathmatch, or MMOs like EverQuest. And even then, online play was generally the domain of PC games, not consoles.¹

What was rather common on games of this era was split-screen, both for competitive multiplayer, and for co-op. Halo: CE shipped with split-screen co-op, and I spent many a night replaying the same levels, over and over again, with my friends, clustered around a tiny 13-inch Emerson TV. Yeah, the split screen co-op of these early games was generally limited to two players, but it was something to do together, a nice pace change from the 4 player deathmatch games.

This, and the subsequent generation of game consoles, really is the heyday of co-op. We saw entire games spend a substantial amount of development time figuring out how to make the game more co-op friendly. Games like Gears of War designed entire levels around having multiple people playing them together, with AI following a scripted path for single play.

In this generation, we also saw the rise of online co-op. Gears of War, as far as I remember, had online co-op from the get-go. Halo 3, which came out a year after Gears of War, had 4 player online co-op, but only 2 player local.² You could play your favorite games with your friends, working together to beat a difficult level, playing along with someone on their first playthrough, or just goofing off and trying to break the game in ways that the developers never accounted for.

Things were good for a while, but around the time the 8th generation arrived, online co-op began to fade. Games like Dead Space 3 were extensively built around co-op gameplay, and critics felt the single player experience suffered because of this. By the time the ninth generation (the current one) arrived, online co-op was a rarity, and often delivered well after the game launched, as was the case with Halo: Infinite. Couch co-op is almost completely dead, with rare exceptions being more "casual" oriented games, such as Untitled Goose Game.

Why can't my buddy be my squad mate?

Since modern game AI has improved tremendously, we're seeing many modern games move towards having a "squad," one member being the player's character. These squad mates exist to help drive the story, provide guard-rails to assist players who might not know what they're doing, and make the game feel more "alive."

In almost every case, you can't replace the AI squadmate with your buddy. Games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 feature expansive campaigns, where your character is generally paired up with a partner, at the very least. Driving around desert-storm era Iraq in a humvee full of soldiers, I wondered why my buddy couldn't step in behind the eyes of one of them, and play a bit of the campaign with me.

Other games, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, or Starfield, are much more "single player" oriented, but still feel as if co-op would dramatically improve them. Starfield has the player running about with companions, unless they choose to forgo them, so why can't I run around with my friends? Stalker 2, you are a "loner" yes, but walk anywhere in the game and you're bound to encounter small squads of NPCs, two to four of them, moving through the zone, same as you do. This would be great if your buddy could drop into your game and squad up with you.

Arguments against co-op

A common argument behind co-op is that it's technically demanding. While it does come with its own set of headaches, yes, its more or less a solved problem in most game engines nowadays. If you use Unreal, there are primitives ready to go for online co-op, that handle synchronization of data and events between participants. If you use other engines, these primitives likely exist as well. If you're worried about players venturing too far apart and causing too much of the game world to be loaded into memory, there are solutions to that problem as well, some of which are 24 years old. You can put a leash between players, so they don't have the ability to wander too far apart, or choose "softer" options, like the teleporting Halo has done since Halo: CE (with the exception of Halo: Infinite).

Another argument I've heard is that the game would become unbalanced should you allow players to team up. This is an argument entirely without merit. If the players want to team up to beat something too difficult for one or both of them, that's their prerogative. Make the game too hard, and players will drop off and lose interest, regardless of how much trash-talk and "get gud" crap one might see on message boards. Modern games have received criticism of being "too easy," but they almost all feature a difficulty slider, and accessibility features that allow a wider range of players to enjoy the game. And even still, ignoring these factors, it's a simple matter of just scaling internal difficulty systems up should you toss in more players. Make encounters longer, spawn more enemies, spawn higher health enemies, etc.

Finally, there are games where co-op doesn't make sense. The recent Indiana Jones video game (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) wouldn't make sense to have two Indies cavorting around, and the previous attempts of the franchise to introduce sidekicks (Crystal Skull) have fallen flat.

Closing

We have these amazing single player experiences that almost scream to be enjoyed co-operatively, with squad based mechanics or amazingly stunning gameplay. Yet they very rarely are. I would love to run through the zone in STALKER 2, trading artifacts with my buddy, or setting up complex ambushes of enemies, but I can't. I would love to have my friend explore remote planets in Starfield with me, but I can't. I would love to have a fellow bandit ride along with me in Red Dead Redemption 2, but I can't³

I've some ideas what a "proper" online co-op experience should have, but at this point I'll take whatever I can get, since its so rare. But I'd love to see the following features:

• Drop-in-drop-out co-op. Since it's a more "casual" experience, and most of my online game friends are adults as well, we can't always carve out large blocks of time. As such, I should be able to join in my friends game at any point, help them along, and then leave whenever I have to go.
• An inventory that follows me. If I find rare artifacts while playing in my friend's game, those shouldn't just be forfeit because I wasn't host. Similarly, if I have something rather powerful that could help them out, or multiple of said something, I should be able to bring it with me, and use it or give it to them.
• Instanced loot. When you're fighting some boss, or looking for loot, or whatever else, and you find 1 really high tier item, it becomes somewhat of an issue of who gets it. Does the host get priority? What if they're the better player? Does the guest? What if they already have it in their play? The best solution to this is instancing the loot, so each player has the option to grab it.
• Progression tracking. If I finish missions in a friend's game that I haven't finished in mine, I should still be able to take credit for them. With more linear campaigns this can become an issue, so it's probably the weakest of the options here, but it's nice for the type of game that can use it
• Separate difficulty sliders for each player. Gears 5 does this particularly well, and older entities have had it as well. Each player in the lobby can choose what difficulty they are playing on. So if you're a seasoned player, you can dial up the difficulty, and vice-versa.

For some games, some or even all of these suggestions won't work. Some games that are far more story driven allow you to choose a save slot as your gameplay, and save any progress you make to that save slot. If the save slot is at a certain point, or you start the game from a particular level, then that can be saved to the slot.

But as I said earlier, this is a wishlist. I'd settle for just having some co-op at all.