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Comic for Friday 4/14 (Early High Res)
🕑 Added 2023-04-13 18:23:12 +0000 UTCI've become so numb to the hype words/descriptors that publishers use to try and sell/quantify their games. At this point it's just noise; words that have been blurred together and smoothed out, had all of their corners and meaning sanded away.
But for me there is still one word that manages to cut through the noise. That jumps off the screen when browsing Steam/trailers/reviews/whatever and grabs my attention every time. "Co-op." I'm always on the look out for a good game to play alongside friends or family, so if I see "co-op" attached to a game, I have to take a look.
We have no shortage of single player games, and certainly mountains of team-based competitive titles that let you play alongside friends, but the true cooperative "us-versus-the-game" games I still find to be a bit of a rarity. Or at least rarer than I'd like them to be. And couch co-op is practically an endangered species.
I don't even know what "immersive" is supposed to mean when it comes to a video game anymore. I don't ever want to hear "soulslike" again. But you tell me a game has co-op, and I'm all ears.
Comments
Michael Knudson
The Steam tags are so bad, especially the user-supplied ones. People just slap whatever tag they want on there just because. "Ooh, this RTS has cars, better say it's a Driving game!" Or if it's a game they hate it gets the Early Access tag even if the publisher didn't release it as such. And afaik there's no way to clean out bogus (or out of date) tags added by other people.
Kaedys
I'm not a huge fan of co-op games, simply because of the annoyance of coordinating them with others. Still, I absolutely feel you on the corporate buzzword blender. Heck, Jedi Survivor is tagged on Steam as "Souls-like". Ya, sorry, that is NOT a Souls type game just because it's hack-and-slash with a dodge mechanic. It's also tagged as "Metroidvania" (lol) and "Character Customization" (yes, because deciding which jacket the fixed protagonist Cal Kestis is wearing *definitely* counts as "customizing" him). Worth noting that "co-op" itself has been heavily diluted. Most proper multiplayer games are using that term now. Warframe, Final Fantasy 14, Path of Exile, Lost Ark, and Destiny 2 all have the "co-op" (and/or "online co-op") tag on Steam, despite all of them being somewhere on the MMO spectrum. Fortnite isn't on Steam, but Apex Legends is, and it has the "co-op" tag, despite being distinctly in your category of "team-based competitive titles". There isn't really a proper distinct tag for a game that is co-op _PvE_ (and that isn't also an MMO).
John Brand
What are these 'friends' you speak of? Coop bores me because I don't have any. Sad, isn't it?
