We've seen more and more games integrate co-op. In fact, games like Army of Two and Conflict: Denied Ops have been built from the ground up to support a cooperative experience. I found this great little article over at Running the IT Race in which the author asks the question, Co-Op Games, Where are They?. The article talks specifically about Bioshock and System Shock 2. The latter game by the same developer as Bioshock had a Co-Op multiplayer patch added on to it after release. It was immensely popular. Yet when the sequel came out, co-op was mysteriously missing.

The game was a literary masterpiece with an incredibly original story. So it was with great surprise to find out that Bioshock, the spiritual successor to the System Shock universe was not going to include any form of multiplayer CO-OP component. You would think that the developers would have included it based on the critical success of System Shock 2. But alas they didn’t and we were forced to drudge through Rapture in a solo capacity. I read recently that Bioshock had just won 11 awards for various things, interesting but did it really deserve them, there’s practically zero re-playability in the game. System Shock 2 on the other hand has mountains of replayability. If they had made System Shock 3 or even re-made System Shock 2 I’m sure it would have been even more acclaimed.

There's another article over at popular blog Infendo in which a reader asks the same question.

what the hell happened to classic, simultaneous co-op adventure and platforming games? it’s not that i don’t have a problem with playing by myself, but it just seems like whenever i have a friend or a relative that i actually get along with comes over, i’m left dry of good 2 player games for us to play. usually i have to whip out Smash bros or some other racing/fighting/shooting game whenever they do.

This is one of the reasons why we exist at Co-Optimus. We need to make developers aware that we want cooperative gameplay as a standard in games. Just like online deathmatch and multiplayer became a standard years ago, cooperative play needs to be next!

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