Teamplay features

Warning: This post is about BOTH cooperative play and team versus team gaming.

This is 2008. I have not posted for a LONG LONG time, but i have good reasons: no major cooperative game has been done since my last post (we're talking FPS here). Prove me wrong in your comments if you will.

How come? Is it really that hard to do? I've posted about different reasons, like this one or that one, on why this may be so, but there has to be a lot more to it than that, 'cause coop games are not here yet.

[There's high hope and great hype in the form of Left4Dead... Please make it a great great game!!! extra special pretty please. It could be the One Game That Brings People to Coop Gaming]

Anyway, i was thinking "This is 2008. Great games came out last year, there's gotta be something good in terms of coop gaming or at least teamplay". I was thinking Call of Duty 4, which included really great action scenes (short, completely scripted, but real intense), and Crysis (though i still have to find a PC that can render it in it's full beauty).

So i went and played CoD4 with some friends. No coop... i knew that. What really surprised me, though, was that there were no teamplay feature except for the vocal chat (press a key and talk, like in a walky-talky). How comes? in 2008? Didn't the creators of CoD4 play BF2? learn anything from it?

I do realize CoD4 is meant for smaller teams: the game supports only 24 players online. But even then: allowing teams at least to split in Red and Blue squads can't be all that hard to achieve? But no, no teamplay tools. It's just plain silly. And really hard for me to understand. And CoD4 is really a polished game: the single player and online game work just fine from version 1.0 (i know, that's the way it's supposed to be, but you know... Games' quality assurance "vary" a lot).

In my next post, allow me to recap what made BF2 a potentially great game for teamplay, and then bear with me while i discuss what else could be there to enhance teamplay.

[If anybody from the BF3 design team is reading this, please consider for a teamplay consultant position! Great rates too!] :D

Stay tuned for more... "soon".