I have a deep fascination with cooperative games. I’ll forgive a game for a lot of defects if it has a fun cooperative mode available. I love to play cooperative games, so naturally I spend quite a bit of time thinking about cooperative game designs and the sort of cooperative games I would like to build. This article explores one facet of cooperative game design, and that’s dealing with player death.

A Brief and Informal History of Games with Cooperative Modes

Arcade machines offered some of the first cooperative games. Many of these found their ways to the early console systems and home PCs. Double Dragon is probably the first truly cooperative PC game that I can remember playing. During the golden age of the arcades, there were a plethora of games where players cooperated to defeat the never ending stream of bad guys. Some of my favorites of this time come from games like Contra, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and X-Men.

One of the most innovative games of all time also had extensive support for cooperative multiplayer. The seminal Doom let up to four people play through all the singleplayer campaigns. As multiplayer PC gaming became popular, the shift seemed to move to deathmatch and less emphasis was placed on cooperative gameplay. Many FPSes followed, but generally speaking cooperative modes only came about as a result of the efforts of unfulfilled mod communities.

Around this time, different genres started adding cooperative modes. Diablo pitted up to four players against endless swarms of dungeon beasts. Myth let two players battle through the campaign mode (I have no idea how anyone finished this game without a cooperative general dedicated to managing those suicidal dwarves). The multiplayer emphasis in FPS games seemed to refocus from deathmatch to team versus team gameplay, which has both cooperative and competitive elements, after Counter-Strike took over online gaming. Halo arrived for the X-Box with a tightly integrated 2-player cooperative experience.

Gears of War for the X-Box 360 took it to the next level by designing the cooperative elements directly into the game. Halo 3 added four player cooperative play. More recently, we have Schizoid, a game that only added singleplayer/competitive modes as an afterthought (it’s too bad they had to, because it dilutes the awesome cooperative experience), Army of Two which isn’t quite as a fun as Gears of War but brings some new cooperative juice to the table, and, as I’m sure every Flash developer is aware, Castle Crashers with its 4-player beat ‘em up cooperative gameplay.

Death in Cooperative Games

The way we treat player death in cooperative games has evolved with the games themselves. Arcade machines were designed to pull yet another coin from your pocket, so it handles player death very differently compared to a game like Crackdown, which has a massive world that spans several islands that two players can explore independently.

Here’s a list of some of the most common ways for dealing with death in cooperative games.

Individual Elimination

You start with a fixed number of lives. When you die, you lose a life. When you are out of lives, you stop playing. Anyone else who still has lives keeps going. This is the most common treatment of cooperative player death in arcade games. If you needed your buddy to help you finish a level, you had to encourage him to toss some quarters into the machine to keep going. Generally speaking, I feel like this is the weakest approach and generally applies only in the arcade environment when it makes sense as a business constraint but not a design one. If you put this into your cooperative game that’s not arcade based, realize how cruel you are being to the player who gets eliminated early and then has to sit there and watch his buddy keep playing, or, even worse, force the guy who is doing well to quit because his teammate didn’t have the stones to make it.

Shared Elimination

This is seen in some early console games, but also as recently as Schizoid and Urbansquall’s own Discarded: Online. The benefit of this approach over the fixed independent method is that it ties the fate of the team together. The strongest player is compelled to help the weakest player, because if the weakest player dies, it hurts the whole team. The flipside is that it makes it harder for players of different skills to play together because a weak player can take down the whole team, despite their best efforts. Its application is most appropriate when the game’s design makes it harder to use the other methods available. This strategy is most effectively employed when levels are shorter in nature and particularly in the style of game in which there is no inter-session saving and the team is tasked with getting as far as possible before dieing.

Automatic Respawn

This strategy usually has the player respawning after a certain amount of time passes. In team versus team gameplay, like Counter-Strike, this can be at the end of a round, or after a fixed respawn timer in Halo team multiplayer. Games that don’t necessarily require the players to stick together tend to favor this method and the reasons for doing so are good. If player Bob dies the equivalent of 1 game mile away from player Sue, and the respawn is conditional on an action by Bob, then both Bob and Sue are going to be pissed every time either of them dies. Diablo’s approach to this method is worth noting. If you died, you could respawn in town without most of your best equipment, and then return to the site of your death and try to reclaim your goodies before you got wiped out by whatever killed you in the first place. Players could also find Resurrection Scrolls to bring back teammates without them needing to trek all the way from town. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it gave you an interesting choice.

Conditional Respawn

Of the different strategies, Conditional Respawn is my favorite. Because it requires the intervention of a teammate, it encourages players to take only the necessary risks, particularly when there is a timer that will permanently kill a player if a teammate can’t save him in time. Dieing takes on a tangible cost, but it doesn’t cripple the well organized team. It introduces new interesting gameplay choices. You’ll be forced to consider if its worth reviving your teammate to get them back in the fight, or tackle your immediate objective at the risk of total failure.

In Halo cooperative, the teammate who fell in combat cannot respawn until his human allies clear the area of enemies. There is no inherent cost of abandoning your teammate, except the added risk of failure if you cannot clear the enemies before you die. In Gears of War, the conditional respawn requires an active intervention in order to save the life of a fallen teammate. The consequences of the action are heightened by making it possible for the enemy to kill a fallen team mate. The interesting choices now have very distinct consequences. Not only do you have to get to your team mate without dieing, you have to get there before he bleeds out or is killed with a finishing move by the enemy. Army of Two expands on the idea by letting the fallen comrade defend himself, so he is still actively engaged with the game. The fallen teammate still has some ability to fire, but the enemy can also shoot him while he is down thus quickening his death. Castle Crashers adds a fun mini-game element to the revival procedure. You can choose to mash the keys and revive your teammate quickly, but you restore more health if you take the time to do the mini-game correctly. The risk you assume then is that an enemy attack might interrupt you and force you to restart.

You should be striving to add interesting gameplay decisions to your games, and the Conditional Respawn attitude towards player death is a good way to encourage cooperative play while at the same time creating additional interesting choices for your players. Conditional Respawn doesn’t work especially well in games where players aren’t forced to stick together, and that is its greatest weakness. Conditional Respawn can be applied to games that have traditionally used other methods, however, and I believe we’ll quickly see it become the defacto design choice for modern cooperative games. Ideally, a smart developer will come up with a way to apply the principles of Conditional Respawn even in an environment where players can get separated by large distances.