There was a time in the last six months when my wife and I needed a break from the World of Warcraft. I keep up on the gaming internets and came across news that a former project leader (Bill Roper) had left Blizzard and went to found his own company (Flagship Studios). This company’s first game is Hellgate London (HGL), a top-tier online multiplayer game in the spirit of Diablo, by the producer of Diablo. It’s post-apocalyptic, magic-using, gun-shooting, demon-fighting. It’s levelling up and getting better gear. When I list it here, it STILL sounds like a no-lose prospect.

After trying the beta, we were skeptical due to the amount of bugs. We didn’t have a lot of experience with beta versions, so we believed the company’s constant reassurances that they were ironing those bugs out. We figured this must be how it’s done. So my wife and I each got the Collector’s Edition of HGL, because the CE came with a minipet and we’re suckers for minipets. My best friend did, too. We’re all gamers, we were looking forward to dive into a new game that we could all play together.

Unfortunately, HGL sucked.

I could go into great detail explaining why it sucks, but to choose one iconic example, anytime you have around a 50% chance to lock up your machine (not your game, your machine) from ascending an escalator in the main city that you are frequently required to pass through… you should look into delaying the release of the game. This is just one problem of maybe 100 that were painfully obvious and stupid, and directly impacted gameplay. I started to keep a list, but gave up.

I’m sure there are many reasons that the game was released long before it was ready… no official word from the company, of course. From them, we got impassioned letters to the community along the lines of “Seriously, we’re working as hard as we can to fix this!” However, their best intentions don’t mean that this pile of incomplete game fragments was worthy of trading for my perfectly functional pile of cash.

The game had frequent crashing, bugs of all kinds (gameplay, network, ui, game balance, controls, video, audio, you name it) that make it unplayable. An example: there’s a character class called Engineer which is the design cousin of a Marksman. A Marksman is your generic first-person shooter. The Engineer is just like the Marksman, except less effective but to compensate they get a robot pet whose equipment/upgrades vanish every time you log out… and a baseline pet has marginal utility. Whoops! Ha ha. They hadn’t got to fixing that by the time I left, which tells you something of the severity of other problems they had going on. Or does it?

Meanwhile, the company continued to say tantalizing things about upcoming fixes (yay!) while trying to sucker people into their subscription scheme (what?!). Rule of thumb: don’t ask for more money until you’ve delivered on what you originally sold.

And speaking of the subscription: halfway through a horrible launch of an obviously unfinished game, with huge, obvious bugs that prevent the basic playing of the game, HGL comically barreled ahead with their first subscription event! This of course meant shutting off the world servers for a surprisingly long time because… something went wrong in switching on the event! On the bright side, due to lack of subscriptions (you don’t say!) they decided to make the first event free for everyone, not just subscribers. The event had something to do with Halloween, but one of the key parts was that you had to collect random pieces of crap to assemble into a new voodoo-doll minipet. Sweet! Let me give that a shot. Okay, I need 6, 3, and 1 pieces of different kinds of doodads. Hey, I’ve got my 6! Time passes. Hey, I’ve got my 3! End of game. Hey I’ve got 50 of what I need 6 of! These things stack in twos? What a pain in the ass. Time passes. Ok, I’ve owned a couple hundred of these things, and my inventory has to be cleared out all the damn time. Ok, I’m all set with this event, let me get back to the story… oh wait, I can’t avoid them? They’re everywhere! My inventory is at the mercy of voodoo doll doodads!

So there was hardly a part of the game that worked correctly and steadily. But wait, there’s more!

Never mind the broken game implementation, the company compounded this with broken game design. An example! As your character progresses, you can gain special abilities equivalent to talents in world of warcraft, and when you select certain abilities you unlock the ability to purchase even better special abilities. Pretty standard stuff. Unlike world of warcraft, however, these selections could never, ever be reassigned. Your character was locked into these choices for all time. Now, remember that the game was incredibly unbalanced in month one. Once they got over things like, you know, not crashing all the time and other core things, they were going to reexamine the gameplay and rebalance it. Part of this rebalance was an obvious reconfiguring/shuffling/overhauling the abilities… wow, so not only is it broken, but you’re telling me that I’m stuck with these beta versions? Gosh, I hope you give me a good character when you redesign me! The implicit answer is “This game is hardcore, just start over with a new character and then choose very carefully.”

Well, no.

And so, having seen the competition, my wife and I returned to the loving embrace of World of Warcraft, which is still fantastic and getting consistently better in virtually every way as it goes along. When I rebuilt/upgraded her computer and then mine, HGL didn’t get the reinstall. I’ve written off Bill Roper, Flagship Studios, Ping0, and of course everything to do with HGL. An amazing waste of money. In fact, this experience has become the hype cure-all:

“Wow, I’m really looking forward to D&D 4e,” I say. “Maybe I should preorder it.”
“You think it’ll be as good as HGL?” my friend says.
And I grumble while he laughs, and he’s right.

(Although I did preorder D&D 4e. Mearls for Overlord.)

My wife loves games as much as I do, and luckily we love playing games together. We laugh and cheer when we do well, we groan when we can’t get past a certain point. Playing together is the most fun part of video games. It’s a great social thing that we can do.

My favorite cooperative multiplayer experience is probably old-school pen-and-paper roleplaying, which I could speak a nearly infinite amount about. But physically getting adults together on a regular basis is a limit function that approaches infinite pain. And my wife’s not into it.

Board games are a wonder of social, non-sport multiplayer gaming. My wife and I are down with BoardGameGeek, we own maybe a dozen excellent board games. We play them with our game-inclined friends whenever we get the chance, but unfortunately they require getting together in person, which is happening much less frequently now that we’re new parents. There are a great number of two-person board games, and we own and enjoy our share. Lost Cities is always a great time. The problem is that most two-person board games are competitive, which gets old faster than cooperative play for us. So while board games will always be an interest, cooperative video games get a lot more time.

The problem is that cooperative video games aren’t at all common. You can’t search based on it in any game engine that I’m aware of. You can occasionally search to find multiplayer games, but without the coop filter you pretty much get the ocean of shooters as your output. And on Gamespot, even with the coop filter you get an ocean of shooters.

We loved Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2. The Gauntlet-style gameplay, done well, never gets old for either of us. We played straight through that game, as well as the crappy sequel and crappy knockoff that followed. Even crappy coop is good coop. Where’s a really good Gauntlet for my PS3? Don’t tell me that the crappy Rocketman is our best shot.

And yes, we tried Dark Kingdoms, as well as Lego Star Wars for the PS3. Actually, those two games failed for the same reason: poor camera behavior + coop + platformy jumping puzzles = utter frustration. The games were obviously designed for a single-player experience, and then coop was added on and mostly untested, because no human would suffer that level of frustration.

It’s not that the PS3 has no coop games. We’re loving Pixeljunk Monsters right now. The game’s so good that we’re going to purchase the expansion on day one of its release, and give a good look at the other games the company develops. Also, Rock Band is pure joy. We’ve got a two person band, and then a four person band for when our best friends come over. And it is so ridiculously fun.

There’s some good coop multiplayer on the PC, but unfortunately it requires the upkeep of two computers. We played through Titan Quest and the expansion. We tried Hellgate London, the horrible experience of which I’ll relate later. MMORPGs are excellent candidates, and World of Warcraft is the one for us. However, the game would never have lasted this long in our lives if we couldn’t play together. I wonder how much of these games is the social element; the ability to play with friends?

Why aren’t there more multiplayer cooperative games? Are me and my wife the only ones who love it? Or is our demographic that small? Are there other good duo or multiplayer games out for the PC or PS3 that I’m unaware of?

So game makers: chop chop! More cooperative games, please. My wife and I have money for you.