Just a short post because I can’t brain good after so little sleep. Here’s an idea I’ve been bouncing around for awhile and I thought I’d throw it out there to see what you all think of it!
The premise is a co-op game, most probably in a horror setting. It wouldn’t work in couch co-op, which goes against everything I stand for, but sacrifices must sometimes be made. The basic idea is that the players don’t always necessarily see/hear/etc. the same stuff. The game should be fairly spooky and slow-paced, interspersed with dangerous, violent action. But, imagine, for instance, that you’re slowly walking down a hallway when suddenly your buddy goes completely nuts emptying his clip at NOTHING AT ALL. Or you keep hearing enemy noises around the corner, down the hall, in the next room – and your bro hears nothing at all. Or you’re forced to split up for a short while and afterwards you’re invisible to each other, or you appear as monsters to each other. It could be hard to do this well, especially if it’s unsubtle or plays on such ideas too much and it becomes routine. But occasionally, here and there, a chance for something weird and spooky to happen would be neat.
Thoughts?
I’m a total sucker for horror/survival-horror (though I’m also a complete wimp and spend most of my time pausing/cowering) and I would totally play this. Co-op with trust issues touches on a lot of my favorite elements of tabletop horror games. Then again, I’m a Call of Cthulhu fangirl, so what can I say?
A ridiculously fun but ridiculously expensive way to do this would be to make the game output to two different TVs, and then the players would have to face them away from each other Battleship style.
I don’t think this could work in the “common” media (I can’t see a game that requires two TVs being profitable, and internet connections have too many issues that would need to be worked out), but it would be tons of fun at an arcade or some such.
Oooh!! That’s pretty clever! Maybe if one of you has normal senses, and the other one is legally blind but psychically attuned, so they can see the ghosts and such but only barely see the walls/doors/etc. That has some promise…I agree, an arcade style would probably work better. Though it would be possible to release it for computer/TV, so it would have 2 disks, and you could play over a home network; that’s plenty fast to avoid lag, and all modern consoles have networking capability now.
Make it Silent Hill!
It’s really interesting when the co-op requires the players to be on two totally different levels; the helicopter cover missions in some shooters come to mind; where one guy is on the ground like normal, and the other guy is up in a gunship looking down with night vision, and everyone is just this little blip on his screen.
This sounds like one of the most annoying things in WoW. Phasing. Whole events can happen to the person sitting next to you that you cannot hear or see. It sucks when you’re trying to help someone with a quest or power-leveling a friend’s alt. But if it was on purpose, I can see how it would be fun. :)
That’s probably the most entertaining co-op idea I’ve heard of.