Infinity Ward Takes One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back
By Chris Cesarano
VideoGamer.com reports that Infinity Ward will only be including co-op in a “special forces” mode, and that it will be limited to two players. Now is when you might do the classic coughing, tossing “bullshit” into the middle.
The excuse they give is that throwing co-op into their story will ruin a “carefully crafted experience”. Ok, I get you. Even though the maps are pretty much designed to include a ton of marines at any one time, you want your campaign to remain sacred and untouched. I buy it. So instead they took certain moments from the single player campaign and threw them into the new Special Forces mode, where players can cooperatively play and even compete together. Turok also worked in a similar manner, to those of you that dared to give it a chance.
The problem with this Special Forces mode is that it only allows for two players. The defense is that “it became a total clusterf**k” when more players were involved, and that two is “the magic number”. Silicon Knights stated something very similar for Too Human, even though I haven’t heard a single fan of the game say they were happy with the player limitation.
I want to respect Infinity Ward for wanting their single player campaign to remain “untainted” by multiple players, but I can’t. Even when there were two Master Chiefs walking around in the first Halo, it never hurt the story or atmosphere once. Not to mention that the game is already designed for a ton of soldiers to be walking around the different open-ended environments to begin with. All you would be doing is replacing a few of those A.I. characters with real people, something that would actually be useful when playing on Veteran mode.
I’d try and be happy that you are at least throwing a new mode that allows for co-op, but you’re limiting it to two people. Once again, how can you justify such a thing in a game that is full of marines and troops all fighting through open-ended environments at the same time? A better idea would be to let the players decide what number turns the game into a clusterf**k, and allow them to limit the number of people playing. That way those that only like two player get two player, and those that want four players get four.
Games are art, yes, but any developer needs to make a single concession that their experience is going to be perceived and even modified by players just by making it interactive. I don’t know or care at this point what Infinity Ward is trying to achieve, but by trying to force players into what they feel is best does nothing but limit the enjoyment of the players. I love authenticity in a war game, I really do, but by being such sticklers on co-op Infinity Ward is doing nothing but hurting my love of it.
...still going to buy the game, though.
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