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[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I want co-op in pretty much any game that has multiplayer.  The story doesn't have to recognize the change.  Look at Halo:  Absolutely no explanation for why there are multiple Spartans, and each one seems to be Master Chief.  Canonically there's really only one, but the gameplay is much more fun with two or more.  Halo 2 was the same, there are just unexplained Chief or Arbiter clones.

Apparently in Halo 3 the cutscenes are slightly different though.  Not in a bad way, but it must have taken some development time...

Unreal and Sniper Elite 3 did a good job too, never mentioning the co-op players.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm peeved when a game *could* have co-op with minimal effort, but doesn't.  Including, bizarrely, Just Cause 2!  As evidenced by the mod that made it a MMO lol.

Just because it has multiplayer doesn't mean it should have Co-op.  Note that the games you listed are all ones that have the player engaged through making them feel like a badass.  Co-op can work in those easily.  However, in games that try to engage you through other means, such as Spec Ops: the Line, it will have the experience weakened.  To quote Yahtzee Crowshaw's Dead Space 3 review:

And just to draw the definitive line through it, the big new feature is co-op. You just can't have any kind of tense survival horror and co-op. You also can't breed rabbits and velociraptors in the same pen. It is impossible for a random corpse to have the desired ominous effect if your wacky friend can pick it up with his kinesis module and re-enact scenes from The Sooty Show.

Honestly the problem here is that space is 99.99+% empty. It doesn't help that people don't really try to model space in 4x strategies as actual space, instead preferring to make it sort-of-like-sea. You'd think that someone would remember after all these years that space has, like, gravitational wells and almost zero friction, which would allow your spaceships to actually accelerate over time, which would be a first truly innovative game mechanic in 4x genre... but oh no, that's too innovative. Can't allow actual innovation to reach 4x games, how else would we then be able to sell the same game several dozen times under different labels with some slight changes?

It's only partially that.  Innovation just plain doesn't sell as well, as it tends to defy several aspects of a genre, but is frequently pidgeonholed as being a part of that genre.  As it is put as part of that genre, those that don't like the genre will skip it and those who like the genre will hate it for changing up the formula.  Add to that the rapidly inflating game budgets (due in large part to graphics frequently wanted as realistic rather than just be aesthetically pleasing) and you can see why it doesn't really happen,

[Sergarr]

While I can certainly see the natural market aversion to innovation being a part of the problem, I feel that graphics are not one of those. I mean, we're currently experiencing an upsurge in retro-style games, which are, well, not very expensive on the game budget. And it's not like the market for those games is too small to exploit, either - just look at Minecraft's success.

[Rolan7]

I want co-op in pretty much any game that has multiplayer.  The story doesn't have to recognize the change.  Look at Halo:  Absolutely no explanation for why there are multiple Spartans, and each one seems to be Master Chief.  Canonically there's really only one, but the gameplay is much more fun with two or more.  Halo 2 was the same, there are just unexplained Chief or Arbiter clones.

Apparently in Halo 3 the cutscenes are slightly different though.  Not in a bad way, but it must have taken some development time...

Unreal and Sniper Elite 3 did a good job too, never mentioning the co-op players.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm peeved when a game *could* have co-op with minimal effort, but doesn't.  Including, bizarrely, Just Cause 2!  As evidenced by the mod that made it a MMO lol.

Just because it has multiplayer doesn't mean it should have Co-op.  Note that the games you listed are all ones that have the player engaged through making them feel like a badass.  Co-op can work in those easily.  However, in games that try to engage you through other means, such as Spec Ops: the Line, it will have the experience weakened.  To quote Yahtzee Crowshaw's Dead Space 3 review:

And just to draw the definitive line through it, the big new feature is co-op. You just can't have any kind of tense survival horror and co-op. You also can't breed rabbits and velociraptors in the same pen. It is impossible for a random corpse to have the desired ominous effect if your wacky friend can pick it up with his kinesis module and re-enact scenes from The Sooty Show.

That's a good point yeah, I guess there are exceptions.  It could disrupt the tone even if we ignore it for story-purposes.
I don't think either of those games ought to have multiplayer whatsoever though...  I heard it was infamously tacked-on in SpecOps.

[itisnotlogical]

While I can certainly see the natural market aversion to innovation being a part of the problem, I feel that graphics are not one of those. I mean, we're currently experiencing an upsurge in retro-style games, which are, well, not very expensive on the game budget. And it's not like the market for those games is too small to exploit, either - just look at Minecraft's success.

"Innovation doesn't sell" isn't really a problem either, I think. One of the biggest hits this year, Undertale, is a JRPG-shmup hybrid that rewards pacifism beyond the point of reason... but also includes genocide as an option. I don't think anybody's ever thought of that combination before now. Innovation is difficult.

And I don't think blaming AAA developers and worshiping indie studios is going to solve the problem, either. I've played plenty of derivative, by-the-numbers indie games as well. Look at how many I Wanna Be The Guy and Minecraft cash-in clones there are, just to start.

[hector13]

Honestly, just the state of gamers in general these days is a pet peeve of mine.

Every single player story driven game these days is met with cries for "co-op", so stories end up suffering.

Every MMO is met with demands for "solo play", so the group content suffers.

Every genre has now "defining" features which if not included in a game means the game is a "failure", yet on the other side of the coin if it has all those features it's "such and such game with such and such skin" and also called horrible.  Also every game needs to be tagged as "rogue-like, sand-box, action, RPG, FPS, puzzle, loot, open world, memetarded, atmospheric, fantasy steampunk futuristic post apocolypse with post-modern elements", whether or not it has any of those things.

Shi**y games are praised for their "art", while good games are bashed for theirs.  Then there are the endless bandwagons, hype-trains, and hive-mind crusades to either promote or tank a game, with no real merit or basis.

I know I'm ranting here, but I really wish for another video-game crash so people can just start enjoying games for what they are again, instead of the constant demand that every game be something it isn't.

I would suggest that's more to do with devs (perhaps publishers making the devs) cover all possible bases to sell their game though. Game development is quite expensive these days; it's difficult for one individual to come up with an idea and do all the bits and pieces involved themselves, so devs need to try to make the game seem like something it isn't so more people buy it to cover the costs.

It's a symptom of making games look pretty, I feel. You need shiploads of graphics artists of various types (3d artists, animators, level designers and all that nonsense) who all need to be paid because they all have expensive degrees in making things look pretty, and want to be paid top dollar (average wage is apparently upwards of $70k/y, and that was 4 years ago) for it.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

"Innovation doesn't sell" isn't really a problem either, I think. One of the biggest hits this year, Undertale, is a JRPG-shmup hybrid that rewards pacifism beyond the point of reason... but also includes genocide as an option. I don't think anybody's ever thought of that combination before now. Innovation is difficult.

And I don't think blaming AAA developers and worshiping indie studios is going to solve the problem, either. I've played plenty of derivative, by-the-numbers indie games as well. Look at how many I Wanna Be The Guy and Minecraft cash-in clones there are, just to start.

Maybe I should have been a bit more specific than saying 'Innovation doesn't sell'.  More accurate would be 'Innovation doesn't guarantee the profit to stay afloat'.

In regards to the second portion, here's another quote from zero punctuation, but I'm not sure of the episode: "Rarely is the unique successful and rarely is the successful unique.  When something comes along that is both successful and unique, you can virtually guarantee it won't be unique for very long."

While I can certainly see the natural market aversion to innovation being a part of the problem, I feel that graphics are not one of those. I mean, we're currently experiencing an upsurge in retro-style games, which are, well, not very expensive on the game budget. And it's not like the market for those games is too small to exploit, either - just look at Minecraft's success.

You mostly tend to see the retro-style games from the independents and the smaller developers.  In big developers, graphics does tend to carry a much greater weigh, and, as a consequence, portion of the budget.  There are exceptions, but that is generally a rule of thumb as I have seen it.

[Shadowlord]

Honestly the problem here is that space is 99.99+% empty. It doesn't help that people don't really try to model space in 4x strategies as actual space, instead preferring to make it sort-of-like-sea. You'd think that someone would remember after all these years that space has, like, gravitational wells and almost zero friction, which would allow your spaceships to actually accelerate over time, which would be a first truly innovative game mechanic in 4x genre... but oh no, that's too innovative. Can't allow actual innovation to reach 4x games, how else would we then be able to sell the same game several dozen times under different labels with some slight changes?

Do you want to play a game where it takes months or years to reach another planet in the same solar system, likely hundreds of years to reach another star system, you can't afford to put armor on your ships because of the added mass requiring more fuel to produce the same amount of acceleration, and you can't have a space empire because it would take years to send a single message to or from one of your colonies, etc? (I'd assume you genetically engineer your colonists to make their DNA self-repair like water bears or deinococcus radiodurans does, which would make them immune to radiation, or immune to getting cancer from it anyways, so that one problem could be ignored)

[Arbinire]

Honestly, just the state of gamers in general these days is a pet peeve of mine.

Every single player story driven game these days is met with cries for "co-op", so stories end up suffering.

Every MMO is met with demands for "solo play", so the group content suffers.

Every genre has now "defining" features which if not included in a game means the game is a "failure", yet on the other side of the coin if it has all those features it's "such and such game with such and such skin" and also called horrible.  Also every game needs to be tagged as "rogue-like, sand-box, action, RPG, FPS, puzzle, loot, open world, memetarded, atmospheric, fantasy steampunk futuristic post apocolypse with post-modern elements", whether or not it has any of those things.

Shi**y games are praised for their "art", while good games are bashed for theirs.  Then there are the endless bandwagons, hype-trains, and hive-mind crusades to either promote or tank a game, with no real merit or basis.

I know I'm ranting here, but I really wish for another video-game crash so people can just start enjoying games for what they are again, instead of the constant demand that every game be something it isn't.

I would suggest that's more to do with devs (perhaps publishers making the devs) cover all possible bases to sell their game though. Game development is quite expensive these days; it's difficult for one individual to come up with an idea and do all the bits and pieces involved themselves, so devs need to try to make the game seem like something it isn't so more people buy it to cover the costs.

It's a symptom of making games look pretty, I feel. You need shiploads of graphics artists of various types (3d artists, animators, level designers and all that nonsense) who all need to be paid because they all have expensive degrees in making things look pretty, and want to be paid top dollar (average wage is apparently upwards of $70k/y, and that was 4 years ago) for it.

I'd half agree if it weren't for it happening even more prevalent to the indie/kickstarter market.  Like right after I made that post I queued up my Discovery on Steam, and it encapsulated this perfectly:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/378720/

Those who don't wanna click the link here is how this game(an indie game mind you) is described: Thea: The Awakening, a turn-based, rogue-like, strategic-survival game, set in a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy world, all inspired by Slavic Myth and Folklore and infused with rich story and a unique, card based minigame.

It's also a 4x game.  The market is really getting that ridiculous.

[Shadowlord]

Steam tried to recommend that to me the other day. My first reaction was "WTF?" and my second reaction was "FUCKING CARDS."

[Sergarr]

Honestly the problem here is that space is 99.99+% empty. It doesn't help that people don't really try to model space in 4x strategies as actual space, instead preferring to make it sort-of-like-sea. You'd think that someone would remember after all these years that space has, like, gravitational wells and almost zero friction, which would allow your spaceships to actually accelerate over time, which would be a first truly innovative game mechanic in 4x genre... but oh no, that's too innovative. Can't allow actual innovation to reach 4x games, how else would we then be able to sell the same game several dozen times under different labels with some slight changes?

Do you want to play a game where it takes months or years to reach another planet in the same solar system, likely hundreds of years to reach another star system, you can't afford to put armor on your ships because of the added mass requiring more fuel to produce the same amount of acceleration, and you can't have a space empire because it would take years to send a single message to or from one of your colonies, etc? (I'd assume you genetically engineer your colonists to make their DNA self-repair like water bears or deinococcus radiodurans does, which would make them immune to radiation, or immune to getting cancer from it anyways, so that one problem could be ignored)

There's nothing inherent about having accelerating spaceships that forces you to have all those things. I mean, come on, we're talking about sci-fi, having access to faster-than-light drives is a given. There's nothing about faster-than-light that says that it only produces a constant velocity, you know.

Just imagine, a 4x game where you not only have to consider your unit's positions, but also their momentum! That's a whole another dimension of strategy right here.

[Shadowlord]

If you want actual space, then you have to have relativity, and then any FTL travel or FTL signalling results in travelling (or sending messages) backwards in time as a practically unavoidable consequence, which means causality does not hold. :V

Forgetting all that, if what you want is just to make an FTL drive that uses velocity and acceleration, so you can't stop on a dime and start going in the opposite direction at the same speed, and so it has to turn around and slow down after the halfway point, just like a real (space) drive, the big question is: would that make the game more fun? It's more complicated and difficult to implement (and to implement AI for) than a standard sci-fi drive, and might be harder for players to understand. They might learn something, but then again, it's still not realistic. It sounds cool, but that's no indicator of fun-ness or whether it adds strategic depth.

[andrewas]

If you want actual space, then you have to have relativity, and then any FTL travel or FTL signalling results in travelling (or sending messages) backwards in time as a practically unavoidable consequence, which means causality does not hold. :V

Its fairly easy to construct an FTL scheme in which time travel is almost impossible. Wormholes, depending on how you lay them out. Warp drive, if you don't pair them with engines capable of shifting your frame of reference significantly.

[Sergarr]

If you want actual space, then you have to have relativity, and then any FTL travel or FTL signalling results in travelling (or sending messages) backwards in time as a practically unavoidable consequence, which means causality does not hold. :V

Yo, I have already said that I don't want "actual space". I want a different space, the one that's more "space-like" than what people currently use, with less "friction". There's no "physics police" that says that you must only choose between currently existing video game abstractions and FULL REALISM, with no options in between. That would be stupid.

Forgetting all that, if what you want is just to make an FTL drive that uses velocity and acceleration, so you can't stop on a dime and start going in the opposite direction at the same speed, and so it has to turn around and slow down after the halfway point, just like a real (space) drive, the big question is: would that make the game more fun? It's more complicated and difficult to implement (and to implement AI for) than a standard sci-fi drive, and might be harder for players to understand. They might learn something, but then again, it's still not realistic. It sounds cool, but that's no indicator of fun-ness or whether it adds strategic depth.

1) Yes, it would make the game vastly more fun. That's a game based on this exact game model and people are having a blast playing it.
2) It's really frikking easy to implement if you know basically anything about programming. Like, we're talking about adding one variable per unit and a few additional lines in function that moves units around. It's that easy. A* pathfinding is perfectly able to tackle on situations like these, too.
3) AI would be stupid about it, no doubt, but it's always acting like a retard in those games, so at least you can have a cheap laugh at its expense.
4) Anyone who has ever played a racing game, or basically any other game with inertia (which included all games with physics engines), would intuitively understand the mechanics of this.
5) Already answered the question of "but muh REALISARMS" above.

[miauw62]

Or you could throw relativity out the window and have acceleration arbitrarily limited by ship engines or some shit.

[Sergarr]

Or you could throw relativity out the window and have acceleration arbitrarily limited by ship engines or some shit.

I was operating under assumption that we have already thrown relativity out the window. I mean, what was the last game you played that included relativity? Unlike inertia-based movement, relativity is not easy to implement, ya...