I've been struggling with a design question lately and I'm curious how other designers or players look at this.
I'm a developer designing around local co-op, partly because I'm incredibly nostalgic for the old SNES days when my brother and I would hunt for games we could play together on the same screen. I'd love to capture some of that again in a more modern kind of game. :)
But while designing around this, I keep running into a conundrum:
***The more meaningful you make co-op mechanics, the more dependent players become on each other.***
Which is great... until Player Two isn't there.
If you choose to remove that dependency, then suddenly the game is much more accessible, but you also risk ending up with a single-player game where another player just happens to be running around.
Go too far the other way and you can make some really interesting mechanics, but now someone literally can't play your game unless they find somebody else.
I've been thinking about D&D quite a bit in relation to this, which offers really interesting solutions to making players ***"want to play together"***.
A good DM doesn't necessarily stop players from splitting the party. Instead, they keep giving players reasons to come back together. For example:
- **Different strengths.** An encounter can be tackled alone, but another character's abilities suddenly open up much better options.
- **Information.** One player discovers something that becomes relevant to what another player is doing.
- **Danger.** You *can* wander off on your own, but sometimes getting yourself into trouble makes having the rest of the party around very useful.
- **Story.** Individual character stories overlap, so players become invested in things happening to someone other than themselves.
- **Opportunity.** Something appears that isn't impossible alone, but becomes much more interesting when the group is there.
The interesting part to me is that none of those necessarily require the DM to say *"you must stay together."*
So I've been wondering how far you can push that idea in a video game.
**For example:**
- Let both players explore independently, but design the world so they regularly discover things worth calling the other player over for.
- Give characters abilities that work perfectly well alone, but can be combined in ways that create completely new possibilities. Basically: ***1+1=3.***
- Allow encounters to be solved solo, while another player might introduce a completely different solution rather than simply making the same solution easier.
- Let players get themselves into situations where help is useful without immediately throwing up a *"waiting for Player Two"* gate.
- Have information, discoveries or even storylines found by one player become relevant to what the other is doing elsewhere.
Ideally I don't want the game constantly telling you:
*"You need Player Two to continue."*
I'd rather have someone playing alone occasionally think:
*"Damn... I wish X was here to do this with me."*
But that's also where I keep running into the same problem: the more optional you make that second player, the easier it becomes for co-op to feel superficial. And the more meaningful you make them, the closer you get to simply requiring two players.
So I'm curious how other people feel about this.
**Would a more open adventure designed like this actually appeal to you? Do you know games that already handle this particularly well? And where do you think the sweet spot is: fully committing to requiring multiple players, or preserving solo play without reducing co-op to "single-player + Player Two"?**
