The History of Co-op Gaming
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The original Neverwinter Nights offered a painful campaign if you tried to play it multiplayer. There'd always be someone wanting to hang back and roleplay properly, reading all the text and drinking in the vibe. There'd always be someone who knew where they were going, and would blitz off towards it at lightspeed. Everyone else was trapped in the middle. The campaign could only work if everyone was experiencing it for the first time.
System Shock 2 was much the same. Despite the amount of time Irrational spent trying to bash a fervently single-player game into a multiplayer experience, it simply wasn't fun. Cutscenes, pacing, narrative flow forget it. What one player will happily accept will quickly have two of them bouncing off the walls.
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We'll use World of Warcraft as our example game, because it's the best and if you think otherwise, we'll burn you with mage fire (mages being, of course, the best class, especially Alliance ones).
Simply playing in a group isn't the cooperative experience people get hooked on. In those fights, you're typically just lending your damage dealing/monster distracting/player healing skills to a simple fight.
It's only in the dedicated dungeons and PvP modes that you start to see the real game, with bosses that have multiple phases to defeat instead of simply a health-bar, along with the simple cut-scenes and narrative flow for areas that make them an adventure instead of simply a target.
An early example in the game is the Deadmines, which takes you through the mines themselves, the factories underneath them, and finally onto an underground galleon. Enemies become more complex as well, with regular monsters being relegated to 'trash', and the big-bads following more scripted routines, such as enemies arriving at certain points in the battle, or deploying more advanced attacks if not taken care of correctly.
The more advanced version, raiding, really ups the stakes. These encounters are built for teams of between five and 40 players and built around the Warcraft universe's greatest challenges, such as the Lich King from the most recent expansion.
