The reward offered by co-op gaming is very familiar to many Ghost Recon fans, especially those have have enjoyed playing in any of the many co-op tournaments over the years. Nine team mates playing together against the AI enemy, multiple mission objectives, built in scoring, and modding tools to easily create an endless supply of new missions, are some of the reasons that Ghost Recon is arguably unmatched in gaming history for quality tactical co-operative gaming. Todays generation of gamers would be overjoyed to hear that their favourite franchise was about to release a title with the above features, and probably shocked to hear that those same features are already available in a game released seven years ago!
The thing is, with the orginal Ghost Recon, Red Storm Entertainment seems to have created a game more than eight years ahead of its time, as todays AAA releases can’t match Ghost Recon’s impressive co-op feature list, infact those features seem to deteriorate with every new release. Look at Rainbow six Vegas 2, while we might hope that the 9 man co-op limit with Ghost Recon had been surpassed, it has apparantly been decreased to two!
A recent article on C&VG highlights the difficulties faced by developers when creating a game with co-op functionality. The question we should be asking is, if Red Storm could code it seven years ago, why isn’t every game developer striving to expand on those Game of the Year features, rather than cutting back? Or is co-op too difficult for todays developers to code in as the C&VG article seems to indicate – post your opinions in our PC Gaming forum!
