Online multi-player has really been popular in recent gaming history.  Myself, I’m not a big online-gaming person, other than MMOs or testing out the multi-player for a review.  One genre that seems to be lacking in multi-player experiences, however, is the RPG.  I always dreamed of how awesome it would be if you could group up with a few friends and tromp through the world of Oblivion, or play local co-op during battles in Star Ocean: The Last Hope.  Too many times lately we’re limited in the games we can play with friends on the same sofa – limited to mostly shooter titles.  (As an aside, I’ve been greatly disappointed in racing games as of late not supporting local split-screen game play.)

All this originally stemmed from the great fun I had years ago playing Secret of Mana on the SNES.  That was an awesome game and you could play it with friends, because it supported three-person local co-op play.  Every so often you’ll find an RPG that attempts to do something similar, and its great.  I only wish more RPG developers would take advantage of some sort of co-op play, preferably support for both local and online varieties.

What would be the advantages?  You would be able to engage in co-op displays of bad-assery with your pimped out heroes, that’s what.  Tales of Vesperia, which I’ve been playing recently, has local co-op play during battles.  I haven’t yet tried it out, but if it works like I think it should work, it’ll be pretty cool.  I’m interested to find out how the camera operates and if its actually more or less chaotic than the battles are now.

On the other hand, the thing about Secret of Mana that I haven’t seen any JRPG do since is allow the extra players to control their character on-screen outside of battles.  Its a mostly passive experience for those other players when they can only participate during battle sequences.  A typical RPG focuses a lot on story-telling through non-interactive cut scenes and include many other things besides battles.  Granted, the camera is an issue if you let four players go wandering around on their own, but you can set limitations to that.  Let each player talk to different NPCs on their own, as long as they’re within a certain distance from the main player’s character.  Let the camera zoom out a bit so things don’t feel too confined.  Let them buy stuff at a shop to upgrade their own equipment while the main character is talking to an NPC a few yards away.  Let the player characters talk to each other in a way that would expound the story, give clues as to where to go next and see how the characters interact with each other.  We do have that now, but its all controlled by one player.  There needs to be engaging interaction with possibly four humans playing local or online co-op.  Don’t limit the co-op to battles only.

There’s also the possibility of introducing co-op split-screen play in RPGs, with limitations, of course. Imagine playing with three other friends in a JRPG – you’re in a town trying to gather information on where to go next. One player can, as I mentioned earlier, be buying supplies at a shop, while another player is in the pub gathering info. None of the players can actually leave town by themselves (there’s the limitation). I don’t think you’d want a situation where a solo player can leave the group and go waltzing across the world without the other players.

The introduction of co-op challenges might be a direction to go, as well. If playing with more than one person, there could be parts of the story where they would have to split up for a short time to advance the story. You have to be careful here, though. You don’t want the game to require co-op play, so it would have to recognize when there was more than one human playing it and adjust difficulty and/or these challenges to accommodate that.

I would definitely like to see more RPGs take up the multi-player bandwagon.  We do have some limited multi-player here and there, such is the case with Tales of Vesperia, but to really be a breakthrough in design, I think you have to keep the extra players engaged more than just the time you’re facing down baddies in a battle setting.  Therein lies the challenge for developers.

We definitely see strides in the direction we want to go – it seems like developers are testing the waters to see if they want to commit to going all out with co-op play.  Now they must proceed carefully.  I wouldn’t want the single-player experience that we’re used to in RPGs to be compromised because they feel the need to tack on multi-player – this has happened in quite a few games recently.  The single-player experience in these RPGs should always be foremost in mind, otherwise they will likely alienate a large portion of their player base.