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40oz

Strong Weapons in Coop

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In almost all my experiences with coop, the fun drops off almost completely once players get access to rockets, plasma guns and BFGs. The Doom arsenal is a powerful tool for taking on even the strongest monsters in the game single handedly.

If I were to create a set of maps intended for coop, I'd make plasma guns and BFGs available for single player, but for coop I'd greatly reduce the available weapons at each players disposal, so that players rarely see a super shotgun, and may be able to find a rocket launcher if they look in a secret area, and cell weapons are forbidden.

Is this too harsh? Coop settings usually include double the monster population. But at the same time, four players with chainguns can bring down a cyberdemon in no time. What do you think? Personally I think coop is for bullets and shells, not rockets and cells.

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Usually the thing with co-op isnt less weapons, but more monsters, sooooo I dunno.

But if the monster count is the same in xoop as in SP, then I get your point.

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Having no rocket/cell weapons at all seems too harsh -- just limit the amount of ammo for those weapons.

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I'm not experienced at coop, but it seems like it could give you an opportunity for a sense of power with the weaker weapons. Keeping everyone on a shotgun would make it seem like an awesome weapon to supress a hellknight or baron until death, instead of everyone quicky finishing it with a SSG or better. And for pistol maps, it would just take one or two shots from everyone to take down an imp. Though there is something to be said for watching plasma and rockets tracking enemies from a third person perspective.

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darkreaver said:

Usually the thing with co-op isnt less weapons, but more monsters, sooooo I dunno.

But if the monster count is the same in xoop as in SP, then I get your point.


I understand this, but the point im making is that cyberdemons and spider masterminds, the most fortified monsters in the game, can be brought down in seconds by a few players with plasma guns. I think rockets, plasma, and BFG are more suited for one man armies, but since Coop is for more than one player, fighting Mancubi and Hell Baron's with regular shotguns together is not nearly as much of a chore as it would be doing it alone. These poweful weapons being used by more players makes the toughest monsters drop faster than it takes a single player to mow down zombiemen with a chaingun, and the amount of time spent fighting the monsters in each room is drastically shortened.

It's not so much the monster's attacks that make them threatening, but it's also how long you have to cope with them due to how much health they have. Potentially you could just increase the difficulty by increasing the monster count, so maybe a room with two revenants becomes 10 revenants on coop. This increases the amount of time spent killing the monsters, but it also increases the number of homing missiles you have to dodge which makes it much harder for players to survive.

Basically what im saying is that adding more monsters creates two variables of difficulty, the rate of the number of attacks the players need to avoid, and the time spent dealing with this rate as they fight the monsters. Reducing the weapon availability only effects the latter variable. A 1000HP Hell Baron isn't quite as detrimental to the player's health as fifty 20HP Zombie men, even though their health is the same. And it's also the same reason why a Hell Baron in a small enclosed room is a lot more threatening than a Hell Knight is, even though their attacks do the same damage and their behavior is exactly the same.

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Difficulty is often a problem I face when making maps.

Do do agree that the game becomes incredibly easy once you get a hold of cell weapons and rocket launchers. The only thing I relly tend to do is reduce the overall amount of cell ammo and rockets and increase the number of monsters. Then we're talkin'!

I wouldn't find reducing the amount of weapons in multiplayer to be too harsh at all. It might irritate some players if there aren't enough weapons and all 2/4 player have is a pistol. Though I found that in Skulltag coop, setting "weapons stay" to NO + "Items respawn" really shot up the difficulty. But I idk if that DM flag exists in vanilla ports.

I guess the "harshness" depends on the amount of players.

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Well I guess I wanna know who coop is for. Is it for people who really want to be stretch their teamwork and fighting skills, or are we talking about people like purist who will play coop to introduce people to Doom or just play casually?

Actually, I suppose giving monsters the multiplayer flag, plus being flagged to certain skill levels offers an entirely new spectrum of difficulty settings, where Cooperative on Easy would be similar to single player on UV, and Hard would be a powerhouse of monsters being thrown at the players at once.

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I was in Sweden in July staying with Kristus for a couple of weeks. We played through all of Curse in co-op. We had done this earlier while testing, but I had the 400 odd ping and was on the other side of the planet. But in a LAN environment, we had to make very careful use of all our items and weapons. Friendly fire was on and the game mode survival. It was really intense to be playing for 30+ minutes on the same map, only for one of us to die. Then the other player had to be careful as hell.

Yeah, good co-op is very difficult to beat. :)

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I only sometimes use the solo-net option to play in coop mode single-player. I like it as it is with the "more monsters" option personally. But I could see how four players with plasma rifles or rocket launchers would make very short work of a demon horde.

So yeah, go ahead and try some without power weapons ... it should be good for multiplayer coop, but likely not so much for solo-net playing.

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40oz said:

four players with chainguns can bring down a cyberdemon in no time.


Sure which is why you increase the amount of monsters in the map, four players with chainguns got no chance against 4 cyberdemons, unless you give them infinite bullets

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40oz said:

Well I guess I wanna know who coop is for. Is it for people who really want to be stretch their teamwork and fighting skills, or are we talking about people like purist who will play coop to introduce people to Doom or just play casually?

Both. People play with different settings. Casuals play with respawning items and ammo. More hardcore players play with more original settings where you need to share the resources. Coop is usually harder than Single if you play like this because you're hardly ever really stacked. Instead of one really powerful player, you're two weak ones that have to communicate everything to not kill eachother or steal something that the other needs to survive.

40oz said:

Actually, I suppose giving monsters the multiplayer flag, plus being flagged to certain skill levels offers an entirely new spectrum of difficulty settings, where Cooperative on Easy would be similar to single player on UV, and Hard would be a powerhouse of monsters being thrown at the players at once.

This is not necessary. I don't have a single extra monster in COOP of Curse. I suggest you take it for a spin in survival mode, or classic coop mode. (without alowing deaths) and see for yourself.

Khorus said:

I was in Sweden in July staying with Kristus for a couple of weeks. We played through all of Curse in co-op. We had done this earlier while testing, but I had the 400 odd ping and was on the other side of the planet. But in a LAN environment, we had to make very careful use of all our items and weapons. Friendly fire was on and the game mode survival. It was really intense to be playing for 30+ minutes on the same map, only for one of us to die. Then the other player had to be careful as hell.

Yeah, good co-op is very difficult to beat. :)

Ah, yeah this was awesome. Very difficult and exciting. I remember when you died in Map04 and I could exit but I started to get greedy and wanted all the kills and so and managed to get myself killed. :P

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