I’m not good with competition. It brings out the worst parts of me! Makes me anxious and quick to anger, so most multiplayer games don’t get a lot of my time. When playing Battle Royale games for example I can feel the bile rising as I lose or even as I take down my enemies. It is not a good look for me. This normally limits my online gaming to PvE, which most of the time is just fine by me. I much prefer to take the fight to a group of 1’s and 0’s who are unlikely to tea bag me or tell me in gratuitous detail just how close they are with my mother. This sort of gameplay is even better though if I can still bring my friends along for the ride.
Teamwork makes the dream work is the old idiom, right? There is something immensely satisfying about working towards a goal with your friends without the over arching fear that someone is planning to yell at you over a headset for whatever given reason they have decided makes you the worst human being on the planet.
Destiny was the first online game I played that was predominantly co op like this. Me and my friend would take to the stars and battle the assorted forces of baddie aliens coming at us. It was a revelation and soured my opinion of the games PvP mode, I didn’t like they way it made me feel! Regardless of the team setting, I felt like I was in it for myself at these times and not actually part of a group anymore, it got tiresome pretty quickly.
Sometimes a game will tow the line of Co-op and competitive perfectly, like the now iconic Rainbow 6 Siege. During my many MANY hours of Siege gameplay, I’ve more often than not seen excellent team tactics and planning before a mission, besides the occasional moments of team killing… Working together to execute a goal in a game that rewards teamwork so well Is hard to come by in online multiplayer, even in titles that insist that’s their mission, looking at you Overwatch.
The most recent awaking of this desire to work together has been Warframe. Obviously when I say most recent, I just mean I played it most recently, I’m aware that this game as been out for years! Don’t @ me! Anyway, Warframe is a franticly paced and well put together free to play RPG. You play as Tenno, basically a super warrior of the far future inside your Warframe, a super suit I guess. Travelling planet to planet with Luke using guns, glaives and air strikes to wipe out bad guys and capture targets has been some of the most fun I’ve had in a long while. Not only because of Warframe’s tight controls and gorgeous environments, But the fun rivalry between Luke’s close quarters melee focused combat style and my old-fashioned gunslinger ways have made every match a wild ride of variety where we can laugh, joke and compare our actions. Trying to outdo each other at every turn just never gets old!
There are plenty of folks out there, I’m sure, who would say I’m a wuss or boring for favouring a cooperative experience in my video games rather than playing to crush my enemies, but lets be honest for a second, the real world is full of egotistical jackasses who wouldn’t help you without some kind of reward or praise. Is it too much to ask that I can enjoy an idyllic world of teamwork in my off time?