This is going to be short and sweet. Co-op is an aggravatingly common request for games in general that have no need of it and wouldn’t benefit from its inclusion, but I feel like Dragon’s Dogma is a special case. Unlike most of the other games where people who don’t know what they’re asking for beg for co-op, Dragon’s Dogma at least seems to lend itself to the concept with it’s base systems. This is a trap, something many people who’ve played Dragon’s Dogma Online can probably tell you and something mentioned in at least one review of it (fyi) but I’m going to explain why: Pawns.
More specifically, the entire game is balanced around the idea of having pawns as helpers. Now, well trained pawns can be quite effective, but they will never be as effective as a good human player. If you’re attempting to implement co-op this creates a conflict of interests. Either:
You design around a party of pawns and the game is stupidly easy with players who are better than pawns are
or
You design around a party of at least 2 humans and the game is unnecessarily frustrating for people relying on pawns.
So as not to present a false dichotomy, there is a third option (change the mechanics for co-op players to compensate for the extra player/s.) However; what that’s going to accomplish is making people who play solo feel like they aren’t playing the actual game and get a dumbed down version instead, so it isn’t a good option either.
The next obvious problem is that you either end up with MMO syndrome where the world isn’t reactive (and despite the poor story the world of Dragon’s Dogma is fairly reactive) to stop other players accidentally (or intentionally) screwing your game/world by killing people or taking a different direction in a quest, or you end up with a Fable 2 situation where the co-op partner can’t interact with anything and is only playing half a game. Dragon’s Dogma isn’t heavy enough on the roleplaying elements to pull off the Divinity: Original Sin collaborative storytelling approach either, nor was that the intention of the developers.
Now, I’m not a huge fan of co-op to begin with, but are you really willing to cripple the game for solo players, be bored silly by a complete lack of challenge, and/or remove arguably the most unique aspect of the game all together just to co-op? I can tell you right now that I’m not. Dragon’s Dogma style combat in a game designed for co-op could be great, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be, but Dragon’s Dogma isn’t that game on a fairly fundamental level, and it simply cannot be that game without negatively impacting the experience for everyone else.
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56 responses to “Dragon’s Dogma Doesn’t Need Co-Op”
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That’s not a good parallel. The salad is the same wether it’s made for 1 or 2 people. At best they could do things like increase the stagger thresh hold for knocking down a cyclops (for example,) but many of the mechanics have no ability to be scaled in that way without fundamentally changing them. You can’t “scale” getting a cyclops to take off it’s helmet. You can’t scale cuttting the tail off a chimera to get it laying down so you can wreck the goat and the lion at the same time. You can’t scale always having your tank be female (main game) or male (BBI) so they ogres only go after the fighter most likely to survive the attention. You can’t scale climbing an ogres back to get it to try to flatten you so you can deal a bunch of bonus damage because it’s “downed.” Unless you want all of those kind of mechanics gone, scaling can’t properly address having multiple people.
>And I addressed it. It’s also the developers problem, so they’d almost certainly make adjustments. Refer to points about adjustments.
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You’re adding caveats. If you had said “Dragon Age Inquisitions co-op increased sales and profits because Frostbite already has multiplayer functionality so it’s easy to do and it’s an excuse to cram in microtransactions that people will buy” I’d believe you. That isn’t what you said though, and is why I mentioned caveats and mentioned how it doesn’t explain things like Skyrim and Fallout 4 (and Resident Evil 7 and Horizon Zero Dawn, the latter of which uses an engine that does already have multiplayer functionality.)
>I could probably make the same claim of Guild Wars 2 and so say you don’t have a basis to know how much more similar they are. Ultimately, I don’t need to have played 1000 hours of it to know how many of the mechanics are either the same as or very similar to Guild Wars 2 (like the entire class system) and what kind of limitations were already present and unlikely to change due to it’s nature as an MMO (like how they’ll have to rob you of significant agency outside of instanced areas to prevent players screwing each-others games.)
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Again, fundamentally different. The point of Divinity was co-operative storytelling, something it emulated in the single player, and seeing as players had control of all 4 of the party members in combat anyways splitting the control between 2 people doesn’t necessitate a change of mechanics to compensate. In their turn based format the potential of 1 person to create and execute an optimal strategy with 4 characters and the ability of 2 people to create and execute an optimal strategy with 2 characters each is not different. In fact it’s exactly the same, because the optimal strategies haven’t changed and neither has the ability of the party to execute them.
I also didn’t see a great deal of drop-in drop-out multiplayer in Divinity, for a number of reasons. Mostly people on message boards looking to do a whole playthrough so people can keep their progress together and so random people can’t mess up a game. Could be that’s just me though, didn’t get it till a couple months after release.
The core of my point is, no it can’t. Not without serious changes to the game and it’s mechanics, the multiplayer being mostly pointless and tacked on, or AI that’s way better than Capcom (or any other developer) has demonstrated the ability to implement in this type of game. The closest i can see is a Dragon Age Inquisition type multiplayer that’s completely seperate, and if such a thing was done and done properly I don’t see a purpose to the single player because Dragon’s Dogma isn’t exactly a story driven game.
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But it’s completely possible to “scale” mechanics like one “scales” health and for it not to affect the single player experience. If I order a greek salad, and the table next to me orders a greek salad for 2, the only thing that changed is the quantity. Eating 2x Greek Salad is not something I need to do as a greek salad solo eater.
There ARE ways to increase the challenge for two players without making it something solo players are missing out on
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You may “rather” but that’s something that is point 3, not 2. My point 2 was: If 2 player is too easy for 2 players, THAT IS THEIR PROBLEM. Dark Souls has an excellent solo and excellent coop experience, neither side is “missing out”, it’s just different. Divinity 2 does the same thing. It’s possible, it can be done.
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You can “not believe that” all you want. As I said, I work with, talk with, and participate in development processes and can tell you this is a cold reality of gaming. Adding even nominal multiplayer does increase profits. Simply because it’s cheap to add and it ticks a box for those looking for coop games. You can “not believe it”, sure. It’s a fact and the reason the industry has gone how it’s gone.
It does not mean “single player is dead” or any other such nonsense, it simply means when it’s bottom-line related and for big studios that run on recycled big engines, adding MP is simpler than creating a new engine or making significant alterations to it. For new studios that have to build from the ground up, netcode is usually too much of a pain and it’s something they often incorporate in the sequel of the title, unless they had a plan and budget from the get-go.
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My knowledge of ESO >>>>>>>>> your knowledge of ESO. Sorry but on this one if you haven’t played the full game as it is know… You know nothing, Jon Snow.
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So, the Fable 2 developers did a bad job. That doesn’t really mean much? To counter their failure, Divinity Original Sin had great success, neither means other studios can or cannot do it, but it does prove it CAN be done.
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A lot of things can be done “easily” and aren’t because of oversight or wrong focus. It was extremely easy for From Software to add item descriptions on loading screens, yet Bloodborne launched with extremely long loading screens that simply said BLOODBORNE on them. It was awful, it was dumb, it was fixed with a free patch because it was that easy to fix.
The core of my point here is simply: It can be done, it could be great, and I hope they do it. I do not want the single experience to suffer, I’m happy to have MP be an add-on like in other games, but it could very well deliver a great experience such as I had with Salt and Sanctuary, Divinity: OS, the Souls series, etc.
Multiplayer for Dragon’s Dogma would improve the experience for me.
I’m surprised this thread came back to life the way it did.
Wonder where the necroposter went.
1) Again, the point is the large enemy mechanics. More of the large enemy mechanics = more of the thing that made the game good. Unless the mechanics they add are really bad, That is as close to objectively superior as you can get. I *do not care* wether or not the fight is a challenge with half the mechanics. Wether or not the single player is also good is literally irrelevant because it is less good in direct comparison to the
multiplayer, seeing as it has measurably less of the thing that makes the game good in the first place.
2) No, I’m acting as if I would rather them spend that money on something else. I’m also claiming that, because it would make the game very easy (the systems were designed for 1 intelligent actor not 2) they would need to make changes to either or both versions of the game to compensate, and you end up back at points I’ve already made. (Ie simple health/damage scaling likely wouldn’t be effective as an offset and if you’re adding mechanics and/or enemies and so significantly changing the fights then why would I want to play the simpler single player?) If they didn’t make changes you end up with a Fable 2 situation (player 2 has no agency, really boring combat encounters, the rewards aren’t especially valuable given you could have just done the same thing in your own game for better rewards without the downsides that come with being player 2 in the multiplayer.
3) I don’t believe that. At the very least not as an uncomplicated statement without 40 different caveats. That’s a line of reasoning from the “single player only is dead and everything needs co-op” crowd from a few years back. You know, back before Skyrim sold 10 million copies in a week (worth mentioning, way more than ESO.) It wouldn’t explain why anyone would bother to release giant AAA single player only games. In fact unless it’s just as good as the single player (and vice versa) it’s going to bring down review scores and low scores are bad for sales.
While I’d really like to tell you the rest of that paragraph is wrong, I’m not a game dev so I can’t say one way or the other. That said, if you have to make major changes to the engine to do something like add an extra step to knock down a cyclops when you already have the ability to knock it and various other monsters down, maybe you need a new engine that has a framework or tool to make that kind of thing easier. I know such systems are in place for other things.
I played the ESO beta. Unless it’s a completely different game now, It’s definitely not Skyrim with friends. There are a ton of mmo concessions made. Many limit player agency so they can’t screw each-other over (say by murdering all the NPCs) and so the game doesn’t have to keep track of things like which of the hundreds or thousands of NPCs an individual player murdered, for several million players. Long story short, it’s more like Guild Wars 2 than Skyrim. In fact asside from an exploration focus and skills leveling as you use them, it’s got very little in common with Skyrim.
I’ve played single player games that implement that suggestion of drop in drop out multiplayer in a single player game that doesn’t change mechanics or encounters to account for multiple players. It was called Fable 2, and the multiplayer is garbage (especially for player 2,) for several reasons.
1) The have to almost completely strip player 2 of agency so they can’t do something like run off and murder all the shopkeepers.
2) Encounters that would have been interesting were boring and easily overpowered.
3) The rewards are lackluster by virtue of being exactly as easy/hard to get in ones own game but without the limitations of being player 2.
The result is not only are potentially interesting fights not interesting for player 1, but player 2 only gets to play half the game and so there’s no benefit.
Where the compariosn between games like DD/ Fable 2 and Dark Souls fails is that the Souls series is designed from the ground up to be a multiplayer experience, even going so far as to emulate that experience in the single player using AI summons (which, it’s worth noting, tend to be significantly more durable than a human player would be and almost always placed just before a boss instead of placed to help get through an area, presumably because the AI isn’t capable of handling the variety of situations effectively.) It’s, by most standards, extremely punishing so less punishing =/= too easy to be engaging. It provides resources (souls and humanity/embers) that are way more difficult to get alone (in part as a result of the game being punishing.) It provides the invaluable but intangaible benefit of being able to scout out new areas and learn the mechanics of enemies and bosses in a 0 risk environment (which is only of great value because the game is so hard.) Even Divinity emulates the multiplayer experience in the single player, keeping the arguments between protagonists and accompanying rock paper scissors match present. That is fundamentally different than attempting to drop multiple people in a game designed specifically for 1 player and expecting it to work properly. If you could manage so easily, games would have done it already and it wouldn’t have been panned for sucking (like Fable 2s multiplayer was, thanks to these and many other problems.)
I don’t agree on any of the above
1. Having different mechanics for MP does not make SP lessened for me. I have been playing ESO for years now and I don’t feel I *must* group or *must* solo. Enjoyment is not something you, personally, can measure, and multiplayer mechanics are not necessarily “better” they are different. Having more adds, or health, or skills that silence teammates is not something that means the solo boss is not it’s own challenge on its own right.
2. The other option of allowing people to simply control 1 pawn does not impact your experience if you want to solo. If the game is “too easy” for them, that’s their problem not yours yet you’re acting like if they having an easy time would cheapen your experience. This is no different than telling people who use OP weapons in dark souls that they are casul noobs, or telling people who coop bosses they aren’t playing “the real game”.
3. “Resources better spent” is also a personal perspective. Economically speaking, adding even nominal multiplayer means more sales (this is something players don’t like to hear, but it’s a cold hard reality of modern accounting), and enabling something like a pawn control mechanic is cheaper and easier to implement, vs revamping mechanics or graphics, which are engine based choices that would necessitate big overhauls. Realistically, Dragon’s Dogma 2 would likely have both, and use Dragon’s Dogma Online’s engine which already has multiplayer mechanics.
Overall this is about preference, I wanted Skyrim with friends and I got it on ESO (even when people say you don’t, it certainly has the perfect feel for it and not hardcore MMO push). I would love Dragon’s Dogma with friends and Online is not international so I can’t play with them > thus I’m hoping they make something that can give us a souls-like experience of easy drop in – drop out multiplayer that does not necessarily affect solo play.
If the mechanics for enemies change between single and multiplayer, which was your idea, it’s *not* the same game. If they don’t, the multiplayer is simply tacked on, mechanics designed for single players and lackluster AI will be very simple for multiple people to exploit and the resources would be better spent improving the mechanics, or the single player has to rely on unreliably AI and gets an inferior experience. Those are the 3 options.
I’m am not assuming it’s half baked. I want the best experience available, and as that experience in DD revolves around the mechanics of the big monsters if those mechanics are more complicated in multiplayer then that’s the best experience available.
But again, the exact same game with simply a player instead of the pawn would work for those who want coop, so it really is a possibility that should not displease anyone and open up possibilities
Also you are assuming the solo boss is half baked, I play ESO and I don’t agree.
The TL:DR to why not is: I don’t want to be forced to play with other people, play half a game, or play a game that’s really frustrating specifically because the pawns can’t handle mechanics designed for 2 humans properly, and I don’t think the pawns can or will be good enough to prevent any of those.
Long version:
For the record, I *loath* that there are mechanical differences (ie more than just level scaling) between NG and NG+ in some of the Souls series., and almost any other game that does it. Like, I cannot describe the level of contempt I have for the idea of having to play through the entire game before getting to play the game proper, with no way to skip straight to the experience I actually want to have, in a way that will make sense. If I find out after I reach NG+ it makes everything I’ve done so far a waste of time, and if I find out before the playthrough (or on a revisit of said game) it’s is not fun, at all, it’s a slog through am unusually difficult 40 hour long tutorial before I get to play the real game.
It’s not necessarily about the challenge. What makes Dragons Dogma, by and large, is the mechanics of the larger monsters. Knocking down Ogres, pinning Griffon to the ground, stripping helmets of Cyclops, ect. Why would I want to play a version of the game (the solo play in your example) where those mechanics are simplified, when I could get to experience the more complex mechanics? Assuming the design of said mechanics doesn’t suck, it’s an inferior experience because there is objectively less of one of the primary things that made the game good in the first place. Why would I be ok with less of the thing that made the game good?
Further, if the AI cannot manage to interact with said mechanics at a similar level to a reasonably skilled human, then the more complex mechanics in solo play would just be frustrating because of the failures of an AI partner. If either of those are the route they took, the game may as well be mutiplayer only and not even bother with pawns, because that would be the superior experience and they could focus more resources on interesting multiplayer mechanics instead of wasting time with dumbed down versions for solo stuff. If the AI can manage, then there is no need to add extra mechanics to multiplayer (though they could be tied to difficulty provided you don’t have to unlock difficulty settings) because AI can handle complex mechanics and provide the superior experience for everyone. I don’t think the AI can, but if it does I’ll withdraw my objection/complaint, complete with a public article for the site.
Gameplay wise, Divinity is exactly the same. Your experience is different, but your experience would also be different if you, say, came to a message board to ask about tough parts, had a guide, or had a friend/family member watch you play and offer advice. The game, however, is literally exactly the same, all of the stuff was always human controlled and none of the systems change. They don’t need to change any of the encounters, because the game was balanced around the capabilities of a human player in full control of everything at all times.
Edit: and yes, you could have the mechanics designed for solo play and just let people have multiplayer anyways, but that would be incredibly boring (and lazy) and the resources would be better spent elsewhere, like AI that can handle more complex mechanics so we can get even more interesting fights.
Because the single player mode can be challenging enough for one player, like ESO is challenging enough by yourself without having a group to do the dungeons, and if you are really good you may want to attempt to take on group bosses solo, or do solo arena/challenge content.
They are different experiences, much like solo souls NG and solo souls NG+ are different experiences, and solo souls is different than co-op souls in weird but fun ways (looking at you Orphan of Kos)
I like playing by myself, and I like playing with close friends. Those two experiences do not need to be mutually exclusive, and this is why I brought up how Divinity is a good approach. Saying that a second player does nothing for the party because it’s not real time isn’t true. Dividing the character management down the middle means each player has less of a workload to develop builds and that you have two people solving puzzles, traps, and scenarios. You also get two people to develop tactics, and two heads do certainly think better than one, particularly if you have two people with different skillsets like Cas and myself (he does the math for the builds, I figure out the resistances and crafting). It doesn’t mean the game is “gimped” in solo nor is it necessarily “harder”, it is simply different and I don’t think that removing multiplayer would affect the game much.
Similarly, I think adding the capacity for a player to control a pawn would not change the base game much for those who want to solo, and would add opportunities for those who don’t, and thinking that both versions of the game should be the same or there should be neither seems like a bizarre stance. As long as they are both enjoyable in their own right, why not?
I know how it works.
The AI in Dark Souls is really bad. Like, really, really bad. On top of that most enemies have extremely telegraphed attacks, a very limited range of attacks, and very specific attack patterns. Yeah they all hit like runaway freight trains, but the whole idea is that anyone of any skill should be able to beat it, which means making it about memorization and planning not trying to find a way to trick whole groups of near perfect AI into taking a hit.
I’m 100% positive that they could program AI in DD to, say, never take damage, never miss a head shot, always use the optimal elemental damage and useful status effects, ect, even without cheating and having the pawn and enemy AI collaborate behind the scenes. That is not the same thing as making them effective team-mates. Their optimal move at the moment =/= what you’re doing/need to have happen.
In a competitive game there is a reason to bring all the AI down below human abilities (so people can beat it.) That doesn’t explain why AI teammates are mediocre even when they have things like perfect aim. Them being unable to work well with you on your plan does. It’s not just DD, it’s Dark Souls and every shooter with bots and racing games with teams.
It’s not a “make it hard just to be hard” thing (though at least kinda challenging is definitely ideal.) People can set their own level of challenge, that’s fine. If you’re adding boss mechanics to the multiplayer that aren’t available in single player, why would I want to play the single player and miss the full experience of that boss? If the pawns can actually effectively work as a substitute for other players (I’ll believe it when I see it) then there is no need to be adding mechanics depending on wether it’s multiplayer or not. If they can’t and you add extra mechanics to the multiplayer, the single player has been supplanted by the multiplayer as the place that has the most of what made DD good in the first place, so why would anybody who has a choice bother to play it and what purpose is the pawn system actually serving?
I specifically said I’ve talked to developers about why they dumb down ai. This applies to 3D real time games as well. The reaction time of a machine is impeccable compared to yours. The machine can always block and will never run out of stamina if programmed not to. It will never make a mistake, the only way to win is to outsmart it and in many cases that means giving the ai less tools than the player.
Even in dark souls, enemies are designed so they are not on even terms with you.
Either way, Single player does not need to change to implement the things I mentioned. You can play by yourself and chose “impossible” difficulty if you want, and others can play in coop and choose easy. It doesn’t mean it must alter the game, and having the cooperator be your pawn keeps the party size down and the experience fun, I think it’s very doable.
I’m just thinking about multiplayer in general. I’m not really comparing.
Turn based games =/= real time games. Also wether it’s 2d or 3d is a big factor., as are things like how much reflexes and situational awareness matter in said game. I’m aware that we have AI that will consistenly beat literally anybody at games like Chess and Go.
I don’t think that translates to game with less rigid variables. For one (though I could be wrong) the AI simply takes the mathmatically best move each time and isn’t capable of doing something like thinking ahead and setting a trap (setting traps involving multiple best moves being how the go player I’m thinking of managed to beat such an AI.) That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s necessary for AI in a game like DD to rival a human (baiting enemies into behaving certain ways is a large part of DD.) It would also need to do this in co-operation with people, so it has to guess your plan for handling encounters and decide what it should be doing based on that, the situation as a whole, and it’s role in your party. Either that or just do whatever it thinks is best and get you killed by screwing up your plan. It also can’t calculate that mathmatically best move the 1 time per turn (there are no turns,) it would need to do so dozens of times per second while trying to account for rapidly shifting variables.
I want the most complex encounters the game has, and whatever mode has them is the only mode I’m especially interested in. Seeing as I like the pawn system and don’t want to be relying an randoms who may or may not suck (or having to have a specific friend on to get the full experience) I want that to be single player. Doing anything else is fundamentally changing the game.
@eldrichimagination
Borderlands isn’t big on enemy mechanics in the same way DD is. It’s not really a good comparison for the same reasons Diablo isn’t a good comparison.
Some games add enemy skills based on player level and party size, for example the world bosses of ESO get more adds and health the more players that are around them, and running a veteran version of a dungeon adds new mechanics that require not just more damage and healing but also teamwork and the avoidance of traps by your teammates or the group is penalised.
I think there are ways in which coop can be introduced into games without turning bosses into boring bullet sponges. I really think dragons dogma would be a great candidate to have allied players take over your pawn. changing the world state to unlock special enemy abilities for coop is something that would require planning but could provide an excellent solo and multiplayer experience
I found Borderlands did Co-op really well (as in I had a lot of fun playing it), even though all they did to balance multiple players was boost enemy health and damage. Because every enemy was buffed, it required a greater degree of teamwork with each player added, so in many cases, it wasn’t just having another gun that made you powerful. It was good teamwork that made the difference. With four players, if you play poorly together, you’re screwed, but if you played well together, you dominate. It was still challenging, but even if (and occasionally when) it wasn’t, just playing with friends is a blast on its own.
For games with a significant multiplayer and single player element, I would like to see AI improved so that it could have reactions and countermeasures to cooperative play.
Ai is already capable of surpassing players. Developers actively dumb it down as otherwise the ai would be unbeatable.
I’m not taking out of my ass, I’ve met plenty of developers that implement such measures, and I’ve asked them why they don’t upgrade the ai on coop and the reasoning is that people approach coop as single player in op mode most of the time, or implementation errors
You can see a somewhat related discussion here (this took a few seconds of google, if you have time look up more details it’s interesting) https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/16287/how-to-create-a-reasonable-ai/16300#16300” rel=”nofollow
That is not what I said.
I said 2 or more people would make DD as we know it *far* to easy, even if you scaled up enemy damage and hp, because people are much better players than pawns and so are going to have a much easier time exploiting the mechanics.
I said is simple increases in HP and Damage are not sufficent to offset the relative ease with which 2 co-ordinated people would decimate everything by using the various mechanics, at most it just drags out the fight and makes hits you take a lot of cheap 1shot kills. (enemies in DD already hit super hard, elder ogres will drop kick 90% of your HP even on HP/defense heavy builds in top tier armor)
I said if you make the mechanics more complicated to make up for the fact that 2+ people are much better able to co-ordinate and use the mechanics to take down enemies then you leave single people playing half a game (specifically playing a game with dumbed down mechanics) or simply unable to fight effectively because the pawns AI cannot do what is necessary reliably enough.
I never made the claim that DD is perfectly balanced as it is. That does not negate any of my points.
I’m 100% positive. I played a couple thousand hours of SWTOR before my EA boycott. I play Guild Wars 2 and Warframe. Double Dash remains my favorite Mario Kart. I spent a shameful amount of time playing Co-op in Saints Row 2 and 3. I even played a good 60 hours of Path of Exile with some of the core members of my Warframe clan. I don’t hate co-op, I’m just not it’s biggest fan (despite all that, I still do most of my gaming alone.) I’m saying that DD is fundamentally incompatable with the idea of co-op unless you want to have the co-op be garbage and not designed for properly, or unless you want the single player to have half the mechanics or be extremely frustrating because pawns suck at executing on the mechanics when compared to human players.>
That’s what I said?
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I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think the AI in games is actually capable of compensating appropriately, but even assuming it is that doesn’t impact any of my points. If the AI is actually better in multiplayer refer to my “playing half a game” point, if the AI is the same it will still be far easier for 2 people to exploit than for 1 person and 1 pawn, cycling back to the problems I’ve been mentioning.
Divinity is turn based, and you control everything. Fundamentally, there is no gameplay difference if there are 1 or 2 player controlling all the party members. There is a very big gameplay difference between 1 person and 1 AI attempting to target a weakness, and 2 people attempting to target a weakness.
Given 5, 10 years AI in games might actually be good enough (and cheap enough to impliment at that level) for this to be a non-issue. At that point, I no longer have an argument. As long as the gap between in game AI and actual human player remains significant, I don’t see a fix. It’s either multiplayer centric and the solo experience is inferior, or it’s single player centric and the multiplayer is inferior.
In divinity, the coop person takes the role of a party member, so there’s always the same amount of players and the same availability of gear as there is during solo play. The difference is there are two heads instead of one, which is not something developers can’t compensate for.
I think it would work, you would just need to introduce some more advanced enemy ai
Molds are molds. They’re typically used for shaping a pliable material into a given shape. But somebody has to make a mold. The first one is shaped however its creator likes. Every videogame is exactly that. There are no molds in videogames. Only imitation.
…it will still be painfully easy for a team of people to exploit the weaknesses and burn something down in no time
So you can’t imagine any way at all for two or more people to find a challenge in any of DDDA’s encounters? Could two people exploit the weaknesses of the online ur-dragon and burn it down in no time? What are you even talking about here? What specific implementation of “a team of people”? How many people? What kind of gear do they have? What vocations are they? Were they able to find or buy enough curatives to split between them? What level are they? What level are the monsters? How many monsters? What kind? Do the players get to bring their pawns? If so, how many? What level? What gear? What primary, secondary and tertiary inclinations? Were they trained properly by someone who trained them with the same vocation? Do they have bestiary entries for what you’re fighting? It seems like a fairly subtle and deep question to just make the sweeping statement that it will be too easy. It requires immense speculation, mostly speculation that everything else will be equal, which is a silly assumption.
BUT that’s why I used the Diablo 2 comparison. Yes, Diablo 2 increased monster HP and damage numbers without changing monster behavior. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t do that and have monsters behave differently. No molds. You said that “all it would do is make fights take longer”? Longer than what? Longer than fighting the same monster with your (not retarded) pawns? That’s just bad balancing, then. Let’s assume we get developers who aren’t garbage, and that they balance it just right, and you and your friend take down a cyclops in just the same amount of time as you and a full compliment of Utilitarian Primary pawns with 3-star cyclops bestiaries. We’ve done way with the “it will be designed badly” argument, so now what’s the problem?
I can burn down anything in the game easily by myself right now. And it would still be fun to easily burn them down with another person. Granted, I’d prefer it be balanced mathematically to start with. If the entire argument revolves around projected ease, then the game is broken past level 100 with zero pawns. And some would mirror that sentiment but mention a much lower level.
Again, are you positive that you aren’t just mad at co-op and that all of this isn’t just a silly veneer to cover up a mere peeve?
Diablo doesn’t change enemy behavior or mechanics afaik (haven’t played in a long time.) It changes enemy counts and damage numbers. That’s a *big* difference, and not really a viable option when the high point of Dragon’s Dogma is multi-stage mechanics. All you’re doing if you implement that in DD is making fights take longer, it will still be painfully easy for a team of people to exploit the weaknesses and burn something down in no time. Diablo (despite it being an action game) can be mathmatically balanced to determine what is and is not possible with X number of players and scaled accordingly to account for the extra body and dps. I’m not going to claim the math necessary to figure that out is easy, but the concept is simple.
Dragons Dogma, doesn’t fit this mold. It’s not about wading through hoards of enemies, avoiding specific AoEs and spamming ones rotation to take out everything (boss or not) all about multi stage and interactive mechanics to make enemies vulnerable for maximum damage. If you adjust those machanics by adding layers to compensate for multiple people, then single players are only playing half the game. If all you do is scale enemies and/or increase numbers, it will still detract from the actual point of the game (the mechanics of fighting the large monsters) by making it painfully easy to manage said mechanics.
The story could be handled how Divinity does it, granted, but the combat couldn’t. Playing single player Divinity is exactly the same as playing multiplayer, all that changes is who controls the second protagonist and the 4th party member.
Perhaps another comparison. Why is it do you think that raid guilds in various MMOs tend to focus on higher difficulties and get bored by lower difficulties, even when they have all the gear they need? It’s not the raw math, Fun mechanics are still fun even if the fight is more forgiving and ends more quickly. What’s not fun is not having to interact with said mechanics (either because the fight is too forgiving or because the mechanics are outright missing) and just tank/spanking everything by spamming ones rotation. In this example, A DD with co-op will either make single player the “story mode/LFR” content that actually competent players tend to be bored stiff, or it will make all the fights stupid hard in single player (with nothing the player can do about it) because Pawn AI isn’t advanced enough to engage with the mechanics like a human player could.
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Looking back at my post here, I still stick with what I thought originally, but to clarify, I’m not against a game trying to add multiplayer to improve the experience, just the idea that EVERY game and every kind of game needs to have multiplayer. Who knows, maybe Dragon’s Dogma could be better with it. From what I played, a human partner would probably be fun.
Don’t mind the necro this is always a good discussion. I’d love to see a Dragon’s Dogma 2 with co-op done similarly to how Divinity: Original Sin handles it.
Holy mother of necropost.
I don’t disagree with the title, since a game doesn’t need anything. It’s like saying you don’t need friends. Quite right, you don’t. But life is more enjoyable for me because I have a few.
You said that players would “feel like they weren’t playing the real game” if the game’s mechanics diverge for solo and cooperative players. First, let’s pretend like that’s an objective statement. Which it most certainly is not…
Past games have adjusted mob statistics dynamically and on the fly the moment another player joins. Have you heard of a game called Diablo 2? The idea of adjusting difficulty on the fly based on number of players is at least as old as that game, because that’s what it did. And don’t tell me that pawns change that equation, unless you have a rational reason for the claim. By the time LoD rolled around, the hirelings were becoming more powerful. If you had been able to build a smart, even more powerful hireling and use other people’s hirelings, would coop have ruined Diablo 2? Would it have infected it with MMO syndrome? Would it have automatically stripped it of all challenge? Would it have crippled the game?
Second, let’s address that they’d “feel like” they weren’t playing the real game while solo. After all these years of solo achievements, time trials and other high level Diablo play, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a solo Diablo player express dissatisfaction because they “were playing a dumbed-down version”. That seems like a one-off or otherwise atypical attitude. But regardless, it’s just an attitude, and a tiresome one at that.
Perhaps it would have been more honest for you to have said, “Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t need coop because I don’t want it to.”
Dragon’s Dogma needs more good DLC.
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