[QUOTE="Filthybastrd"]
Coop would make me not buy this game. Sure add it to racing, shooters, "horror", action, adventure but leave the bloody rpg's alone!
It does sacrifice the story.
PsychiKleftis
You may or may not realize that the veritable birth of today's video game RPG's was the Dungeons & Dragons table top game. Even with the most rudimentary understanding of how D&D works you can figure out that it was all about playing with (or against) friends (aka multiplayer).
Going even further back, the inspiration for D&D drew heavily on previous works of fiction, mostly in the form of fantasy novels... These novels almost exclusively involved the protagonist co-operating with at least one companion (more often a group) to complete their given quest.
With that being said I can now move on to my point, which is to correct a common misconception (portrayed in the above quoted statement); NO ONE IS "ADDING" CO-OP TO RPG'S. CO-OP HAS BEEN STEADILY PHASED OUT OF THEM. CO-OP IS HOW THEY BEGAN, AND IS, CLASSICALLY, HOW THEY SHOULD BE.
Now, if you don't like co-op, that's FINE. It doesn't make you any less of a person or bear any kind of penalty or "badness". As I said before, it's a different play-style, and I can always respect that. There will continue to be single player RPG's made, and I am glad for that, because there are people who enjoy them.
I just can't abide when people say RPG's should not have co-op "because it makes them bad" or "takes away from the story". RPG games, almost without exception, throw a myriad of NPC's at you to join your party. You ARE co-operating with them. You ARE playing co-op... except with an NPC, and not a friend.
What is needed is some visionary developer to create a game that seamlessly incorporates your actual friends into your group as if they were meant to be there, like the easily scripted, controlled, and comparably dull NPC.
Difficult? Very much so. Impossible? Absolutely not. Worth the time? Only if you like making a lot of money and building an amazing reputation, not to mention an incredible game.
The rise of the casual gamer has caused the rise in single-player games, and that's understandable. People want to make money, so they cater to their audience. However, don't be so naive as to think the way things are now, are the way they have always been.
I am sorry but at some point you have to make dissections on what is important to the game and co-op is one of the least important thing in a game like Dragon Age. If you want co-op RPGs then you should be looking at games like Diablo or Sacred where the focus is more on fast paced combat action. Those games work because the story is not central to the experience and there fore it makes no difference if you co-op with one person one day and another the next day, but with a game like Dragon Age where the story told is said to be tailored to the player what happens when the players keep getting swapped all the time?
Bioware would either have to make the second player nothing more than a bit player following the "main" player as he/she goes through the game (who wants to do that?) or change the story so that neither are too closely intertwined with it (which I would say is taking something from the story).
The problem with that idea is that of balance. What happens if the players are of different levels, at different stages of the game, have made different decisions? It is not a simple matter of swapping your single player NPCs for another player. I mean would you want to jump into your friends game and play as one of his npcs, which you have had no hand in building and at the end of the session have nothing to show for it (it is his gameworld after all)? How much freedom should a person visiting your world have over it? Should he be able to take independent action or make decisions that could ruin or change your gameworld?
So you are left with a couple of options,
1) Create a world where the action of the gamer does not really change the world (like MMOs and action RPGs)
2) Make it so that a multi-player game can only continue with all the members present (which means you are at the mercy of all your friends timetable)
3) Each gamer creates his own world which he can play single player and have friends pop in to play as one of his npc temporarily (which could end up being unsatisfactory for the main player or the "visitor" because one is having a stranger play with his "toys" and the other knows he will get very little reward from spending time in this world)
4) Create a single player game focused on telling a story with your main character playing a major role.
They opted for option 4 and I have to say they made the right choice. Games like tabletop D&D work because you have the reliability of friends who are willing to set the time to meet and play (Option 2), and that kind of thing is going to be hard to manage for a computer game (especially when you can have people in different timezones). As for D&D books that is an odd argument to make. By that reasoning could not Dragon Age still be considered Co-Op since your character is still adventuring with companions, it is just that they are all controlled by one person much in the same way that all the characters in a book are controlled by the author.
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