Favorite uses of teamwork in video-games

Eternal Nothingness

For me, my favorite usage of teamwork in a video-game has to be Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Whenever I play this game, I often set-up two-on-two battles, where members of each team have to work together to defeat the other team. When in a team, each character's offensive and defensive capabilities increase with a partner, rather than when alone. And, when one team-member gets knocked out and disqualified in a stock-match, the other team-member is helplessly ganged-up upon by the two opponents.

The teamwork in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is also made more apparent in 2-on-1 and 3-on-1 battles. Depending on the match, I could have the two-man team's handicaps set to 150%, or the three-man team's handicaps set to 300%, while the one-man team's handicap is set to 0%. Despite this, the match is still toward the two/three-man team's favor, as they'll still quickly and easily gang-up on that one solo character!

This is why I seem to prefer 2-on-2 matches instead. The reason is because where 2-on-1 and 3-on-1 fights are too one-sided no matter how fair I try to make them, 2-on-2 fights are more fair, balanced, and strategic. 2-on-1 and 3-on-1 fights are mostly won through brute strength for the 2/3-man team, while 2-on-2 games require much more teamwork considering how evenly-matched they are.

What are your favorite usages of teamwork in video-games, and why?

fragglefart

Cool idea for a thread.

Rock Band for me, nothing is better than getting a pile of mates over for some good times blasting through awesome songs.

Or, if you are playing with someone decent, either going Hell-for-leather and earning your golden cookies, or even assisting each other and scraping through some of the more challenging songs.

Also Horde mode, Horde mode is basically something I've been waiting for forever in games and teaming up with a bunch of mates to stem the flow in the face of ever-increasing numbers of enemies is just great. The fact it is being implemented in more and more games is fine by me.

Can't wait for the new Horde in Gears 3 this week!

Taramoor

Well, when I think of teamwork I'm more thinking of games where I control the entire team. Something like Lost Vikings or Fire Emblem where you plan out your moves in advance so your team gets things done.

But for online or co-op teamwork I think it's tough to beat Splinter Cell multiplayer.

Shen

Can we extend this to single player games with wonderful synergy? Radiant Historia's combat system is excellent, where you use abilities to reposition enemies so that your allies' attacks can hit more of them, and Advance Wars: Dual Strike lets you unleash wonderfully broken strategies by saving up for a Tag super.

In general though, pretty much any good co-op game has the potential for fantastic moments, Left 4 Dead and Resi 5 are two great examples, but my two most vivid memories are of Demon's Souls and Vanilla WoW.

1. I was a Blue Phantom in Demon's Souls, I'd pressed on ahead of my friend in 3-1 when "Player has invaded this world!" flashes up on the screen. I sprint back just in time to see a Meat Cleaver black phantom bearing down on my friend; they had just sent him sprawling and were about to deliver the coup de grace. I backstab him and draw his attention long enough for my friend to finish him off.

2. I was levelling a dwarf priest alt alongside a friend's mage alt in Redridge and we end up with a high level elite quest tasking us with taking down a guy at the top of a tower. We fight our way up and confront the guy... who then summons a level 30 elite abomination. We pull out quite literally every skill in our arsenal to take them down; kiting, fearing, shackling, heals and drains, made all the more difficult due to the fact that the enemies were so high level we were missing 1 in 5 attacks and the enemy mage was ranged. Very little else in WoW has managed to match that experience.

I don't know how much of those stories will be coherent to people who haven't played the games, but they were very good times indeed.

Domhnall

Left 4 Dead was probably the most fun I had regarding teamwork. Even being one man down is a huge burden and makes the rest of the level considerably more difficcult. You may have all the same abilities but each person is nearly helpless on their own. Smokers, hunters and boomers are incredibly dangerous to a single person whilst in L4D2 chargers and jockeys are also a huge threat. Then on expert there's the huge amount of damage friendly fire does which means everyone needs to cover different areas (since a single hit from a common infected will take off 1/5 of your hp) and constantly communicate as to who has what weapon.

Nevermind the versus mode where your infected attacks are constantly being coordinated, replanned, moved ahead. It's amongst the most fun I've ever had.

CaptainNemo

I don't know if this what you mean, but the team dynamic in Republic Commando is amazing, and to this day remains my favorite team in gaming. The Third Street Saints also have a suprisingly sweet relationship in Saints Row 2.

Cannon Goose

My brother and I trying out our goofy-ass plans in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's co-op.

Really we were a team that never worked! I don't recall ever beating a single co-op mission

Chrono Helix

Chrono Trigger's dual and triple techs.

Daris

The party mechanics in Final Fantasy XI. In particular, the Thief's bread and butter. Mobs were hard, and the party needed to work together well to kill them, but then you had experience chains that rewarded being able to kill several in succession.

An example:

The thief pulls a target, the second melee taunts the mob as it comes in. Now, the second melee is NOT the tank, so the thief and the tank have to quickly setup what was reffered to as SATA.

The Thief had sneak attack, which increased damage on the next strike significantly so long as the Thief was behind a target. Then they had trick attack, which did the same thing so long as a Thief was behind another person... also giving the person they were behind the 'hate'.

Now the tank has a large spike of hate and the dps can go balls out from the get go. This has the benefit of letting the healer have to spend less mana, but it also has the benefit of shortening the fight. Which lets the mages go back to resting for mana and the Thief back to pulling.

The next pull is where things get interesting. In the first fight the thief and the second melee were striking the mob, getting tp for weapon skills.

Now the second melee gets the attention of the mob and uses his tech attack. For this example, let's say it's a Dragoon using Double Thrust. Now the Thief is behind the tank and already has SATA prepped, and follows with his own weapon skill Viper Bite. The tech attack benefitting from the modifiers of SATA for massive damage.

However, Final Fantasy rewards teamwork through and through, and wait there is more! Weapon skills could be chained, with proper timing to create a skill chain. This was an elemental reaction of one of three levels. The most common was a second level. This would carry two elements and do damage based on the damage of the attack that closed the chain. In this case, the Thief's massive SATA weapon skill. Thus, the skill chain ALSO does massive damage.

Then, the mages can 'magic burst' off the skill chain with spells of the same element. Since monsters resisted magic and the skillchain removed resistance, the damage on magic bursts would make even the king of dps Black Mages drool. Needless to say, every other pull would be an incredibly short fight.

Teamwork even expanded from this point. Level three skillchains were even more powerful and took three high level weaponskills linked to create. Also, mages got 'ancient' magic. Spells of absurd power that would have to have their casting started before the skill chain to burst.

On top of this FFXI was a masochist's game. Mobs linked, there were usually hostile mobs in an area that the party could NOT fight, and the party needed to work together just to get where they were going and level. You'd have a link and the thief would have to escort them to the zone line if they had a bad party. A good party would have the healer or second caster weaken a mob so that the primary mage could actually manage to sleep the target. The difficulty of the targets made the party have to work together just to debuff it.

Heck you even had the Ninja's elemental wheel. Each ninja elemental attack weakened a monster's resistance to another element, so as a Ninja dodge tank they had to work with the mages. Either to help damage or land debuffs, but the timing had to be precise.

Then you had raids. I may have played Warcraft longer and enjoyed it for longer, but it has nothing on the difficulty FFXI presented. That or the teamwork. Everything is far easier and the abilities stack more than synergize.

Tef

For me some of my best experiences have been with the battlefield series. Getting a group of my friends together, devising a cunning plan and more often than not watching our 'perfect' plans fall apart in the most spectacular fashion possible are some of my fondest gaming memories.

Time spent playing with friends in the total war series (mostly Rome and medieval II) and freelancer are also up there in memorable gaming experiences

Eternal Nothingness

Shen wrote:

Can we extend this to single player games with wonderful synergy? Radiant Historia's combat system is excellent, where you use abilities to reposition enemies so that your allies' attacks can hit more of them, and Advance Wars: Dual Strike lets you unleash wonderfully broken strategies by saving up for a Tag super.

In general though, pretty much any good co-op game has the potential for fantastic moments, Left 4 Dead and Resi 5 are two great examples, but my two most vivid memories are of Demon's Souls and Vanilla WoW.

1. I was a Blue Phantom in Demon's Souls, I'd pressed on ahead of my friend in 3-1 when "Player has invaded this world!" flashes up on the screen. I sprint back just in time to see a Meat Cleaver black phantom bearing down on my friend; they had just sent him sprawling and were about to deliver the coup de grace. I backstab him and draw his attention long enough for my friend to finish him off.

2. I was levelling a dwarf priest alt alongside a friend's mage alt in Redridge and we end up with a high level elite quest tasking us with taking down a guy at the top of a tower. We fight our way up and confront the guy... who then summons a level 30 elite abomination. We pull out quite literally every skill in our arsenal to take them down; kiting, fearing, shackling, heals and drains, made all the more difficult due to the fact that the enemies were so high level we were missing 1 in 5 attacks and the enemy mage was ranged. Very little else in WoW has managed to match that experience.

I don't know how much of those stories will be coherent to people who haven't played the games, but they were very good times indeed.

You know, now that I think about it, let's include single-player games with teamwork as well!

Here are two good examples of teamwork done well in single-player campaigns: Mass Effect 2 and Starcraft 2.

With Mass Effect 2, Shepard has twelve resourceful teammates, two of them (Zaeed and Kasumi) only available as DLC on Xbox Live. Half of the team were powerful combatants (Jacob, Garrus, Grunt, Thane, Legion, and Zaeed), while the other half were resourceful supporters (Miranda, Mordin, Jack, Tali, Samara, and Kasumi). Individually, they were pretty good at their respective jobs, but when combined together as a team, they were incredibly efficient, even against desperate and impossible odds!

And then comes along Starcraft 2. There's so much chemistry between the structures that produce, supply, and upgrade units, and the units defending those structures by attacking the opposing armies' own units and structures! It's almost like when you take a good look at a warrior and mage; the former deals and absorbs a lot of damage from single-targets, while the latter casts spells to attack multiple targets while healing said former! Except in Starcraft 2, the warrior is replaced with units, while the mage is replaced with structures!

Hell, I even did a TV Tropes page on this, titled "Combat and Support." Click on the following link if you don't believe me: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CombatAndSupport

Jintor

Domhnall wrote:

Left 4 Dead was probably the most fun I had regarding teamwork. Even being one man down is a huge burden and makes the rest of the level considerably more difficcult. You may have all the same abilities but each person is nearly helpless on their own. Smokers, hunters and boomers are incredibly dangerous to a single person whilst in L4D2 chargers and jockeys are also a huge threat. Then on expert there's the huge amount of damage friendly fire does which means everyone needs to cover different areas (since a single hit from a common infected will take off 1/5 of your hp) and constantly communicate as to who has what weapon.

Nevermind the versus mode where your infected attacks are constantly being coordinated, replanned, moved ahead. It's amongst the most fun I've ever had.

I fucking love Versus mode. L4D emphasises teamplay so much on both sides, it's insane. I love it.

Jintor

You only mean in gameplay though right?

Eternal Nothingness

Jintor wrote:

You only mean in gameplay though right?

EDIT: Just so you know, I've edited my second post just to help you get a "yes" for an answer, thus helping this make sense for you.

peterdevore

I'm kinda disappointed at how bad team based games are at encouraging coordination. They have come along well in encouraging just helping each other out at a certain point of time, like giving points for assists and healing, but anything longer term, involving more than two people outside of the main objective is really unexplored.

A thing I want to see tried out is applying that thing that improv everywhere does, a bunch of people follow instructions from a mp3 they start at the same time, to multiplayer objective based games. For FPSes, you could do some awesome coordinated attacks or just goofy fun stuff like 'now all throw a grenade', 'now all switch to rocket launchers/tubes'. You can also put some roleplay voice acting and sound effects in there to spice it up.

If you want some more control over the coordination, you could make the mp3 into a soundboard that a designated person uses over vent/whatever voice chat. Like, if the enemies take point B, you can trigger the soundboard for a coordinated attack on point B, maybe split over two phases, preparation and attack. Preparation would be something like 'squad 1, get a tank on grid D4, squad 2, hole up in C2'. Then when they are in place the coordinator would trigger the attack phase, making good use of the roles of the squads in relation to their positions.

I'd like to get to something of a middle ground between two way voice communication, even just casual two way like usual on PA servers, and zero communication. Ideally you just use the ingame communication for this so even random people dropping in can take part in the coordination without needing to wear a headset all the time and be in the right vent room. Right now it might be too much to ask from randoms to listen and take part in a plan, but I hope that a well produced soundboard tactic could gain some traction and respect once people catch on that it really helps them win games even with randoms.

Using a somewhat preset approach to coordination enables and encourages you to optimize your plans before the actual game starts. You could even take a scientific approach to them, gathering stats on what soundboards work well and which don't. You can also easily share these soundboard sets with other people, enabling a community of tacticians, roleplayers, voice actors and sound editors to work together to make cool stuff.

Cantido

Officially, Kirby Superstar .

In Gears of War 2, there's this particular moment my brother and I got amusement out of, where both players have to carry a bomb, and it was like moving furniture in a home, so we thought it was hilarious.

minor incident

I never felt like more of a coordinated unit of destruction than when me and two buddies were playing Secret of Mana, yelling out cues to each other to perfectly chain together offensive magic to take down bosses in a ballet of destructive fire and devastation.

minor incident

Also, no one mentioned Ico as a great example of (single player) teamwork?

For shame.

Cantido

minor incident wrote:

Also, no one mentioned Ico as a great example of (single player) teamwork?

For shame.

*grumble grumble* now I have to preorder the collection.

minor incident

Cantido wrote:

minor incident wrote:

Also, no one mentioned Ico as a great example of (single player) teamwork?

For shame.

*grumble grumble* now I have to preorder the collection.

My work here is done.

A duck!

No poll threads.