This is the hardest part about coop to deal with. Personally, I think it would be best if it was handled like Synergy, where the first person reaching the change entity trigger will start a timer which everyone else must reach the end before it runs out, then if everyone gets there, the map chaneg takes place immediately.
However more than that is needed. I would like to see dynamic obstacles and enemies, though this would likely be incredibly hard to implement. Essentially my idea would consist of the game actually tracking the players’ progress through each map and giving handicaps to the damage done by players based on how far ahead or behind the average they are.
If you are really far ahead of everyone else, your weapons do less damage to enemies, and crates and planks are harder to break with the crowbar. You can still progress, but that progress is hampered. If you are far behind, your damage is increased so you can break and kill things faster to catch up easier.
If this were to be implemented, I would also like to see individual enemy spawns. Essentially, if you had a point where a battle would take place, each player would provoke their own enemy spawn. This would mean that if someone reached an area first and killed all the enemies before anyone else got there, then a new enemy spawn would take place so that the people who were following behind would still be able to get some fighting in.
Of course, these enemies would need to disappear after that individual player left the general vicinity, or else you could have someone racing through, activating enemy spawns and then leaving them behind to further slow down players who were already falling behind.
Individual player based spawns would also allow players who were actually sticking together to have more enemies to deal with, allowing battles to be balanced no matter how many players you had or how well your group was(or wasn’t) sticking together.
Actually, there’s currently no problem with items and weapons transitioning from map to map. The problem is that there is no way to SAVE the progress you make. What I’d really like is if you could have a coop setting called “campaign mode” which would actually allow whoever is running the game to create a save point in which each player’s weapons, ammo, health, and progress would be recorded so that you could put the game down and pick it back up. If you had someone drop out after joining in, and then everyone else kept playing, the person who dropped out would have their individual health and ammo preserved, but the next time they joined back in, they would start at the beginning of the new map that everyone else was on, and would gain any weapons that were introduced in the previous maps (but without ammo)
I’m putting these both together because I have one solution that addresses both issues. I would like to see this implemented as a new “weapon” perhaps have it in place of where the gravity gun would normally go. The “weapon” would use primary fire to give health to other players, secondary fire would give suit charge to other players, and pressing the reload button would give ammo to whatever weapon the receiving player was holding. The “weapon” would be filled with whatever excess ammo, health, or suit chargers you came across once your own health, suit, or weapons were fully stocked. There would be limits to how much ammo, health and charge each player’s “weapon” can hold though.
Dude, did you steal this idea from one of my previous posts? 4.2 is the perfect way to do things. If an individual player needs more ammo than what is dropped standardly, then that can be taken care of through the “weapon” I specified in the previous section. With this, I would also like to see health and charge stations handled the same way.
This is pretty simple. Have all 3 suit stations active in multiplayer, but then have a new suit come up from below to restock each suit station after 1 has been taken. Sure, the 4th guy has to wait for it, but that’s still manageable. I recall it being mentioned that Black Mesa coop was planned to be designed around the idea of 4 players, but not to be fixed to that amount in any way. So people may use only 2 or 3, or may possibly use even more players. So having each of the suit stations as auto restocking themselves is pretty much the only way to do this reasonably.
I can’t even believe the 3rd idea was suggested. haven’t we learned from teh frustration of plying Decay? That is, and would be, an absolute bitch for everyone. The 2nd idea wasn’t much better, it would be an absolute bitch for the player who died. Sure it’s incentive not to die, but then there’s also no incentive to not just drop out once you’ve died. I highly recommend the first idea, where spawn points are activated throughout each map as you reach them.
It would be kinda cool if you could have the respawn time actually move faster if you clicked the mouse button repeatedly. Maybe 10 - 15 seconds if you just let it sit, but only 5 - 10 seconds if you repeatedly clicked the primary mouse button. It might help alleviate the frustration if the player finds out that their frustrated clicking IS actually making the time run down faster.
I don’t think dynamic lights should be affected by other players. that’s a lot of processing to handle all those different points of light. If I remember synergy correctly, they didn’t even show the actual spot of light from other player’s flashlights, they simply made players who had their flashlight on show up with a short area all around them slightly brighter.
