Until recently, co-op play on consoles has been limited to local multiplayer. Before that, you could go to an arcade and play X-Men with five strangers. Do you think something was lost in terms of co-op play with the death of arcades? Do you think online play now is bringing some of that feeling back?
Paul: I think the death of arcades is an interesting one. I think that might have been why it sort of vanished for a while. I do think online has empowered more people to be able to play together, especially as our world gets smaller and people move away but still want to keep in touch. Online stuff allows people to still do that, while you can’t really do split-screen with your friend that lives in Los Angeles. Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about that. Online is definitely bringing it back, and I think people have started to realize that gaming can be a time just to get together and enjoy being with your friends. I think there’s a large segment of our market that doesn’t have that antagonistic, in-your-face trash-talking. They just don’t want that from their entertainment time. I think that’s another thing that co-op is bringing, is (hey, let’s get together and play a game and not want to kill each other after we’ve been playing for a while!) A more camaraderie-type of experience; I think that’s a big part of it.
Jonathan: I remember playing tons of arcades and lots of co-op, and I loved it. I think there’s something very civil about having someone in the room with you playing. Also, you’re always on the same screen, so it’s really easy to have this shared experience. You’re looking at the same enemies, so when I say (he’s over there,) my friend knows what (over there) is. Games sort of moved away from that and moved to first-person shooters, and originally there were some technical difficulties to bringing those co-op moments back. Once you go to first-person shooter, you’re almost by definition on separate screens. At the very least, if you’re even doing split-screen you’re looking at two different things. It makes the indication a little more difficult. With co-op play over the internet, we have the anonymity over the internet and people aren’t quite as civil. As a culture, we’ve sort of had that experience. We’ve sort of realized (hmm…I don’t like that.) We want a more civilized co-op experience. I think games have kind of opened up to this and the culture is kind of opening up to this. Now people are playing online with extensive friends lists and they know who they want to play with and who they don’t want to play with. You see games going on a larger scale of like (if other people think you’re a jerk, we’ll rate you like this. If you’re rated well, you get to play with the nice players.) I think there are a lot of things that happened really within the last two or three years that are really creating this explosion of co-op gameplay. We’re really trying to surf that wave with Borderlands.
Paul: We’re at a moment in this generation where a lot of games haven’t really done a lot with co-op. People who were enjoying the co-op experiences that the few games that were doing it, they were looking for (where’s another co-op game? I want a co-op game. Ok, let’s go grab Borderlands and play that together.) We were really able to take advantage of that. The other thing that’s really allowed co-op gaming to explode is Microsoft putting a microphone in the box. They put a microphone in the box, and you didn’t need to set it up, it just worked. That has allowed that communication barrier to get dropped.
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Even after Xbox Live and PSN brought widespread online play to consoles, it took a while for really seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op experiences to show up. What are some of the hurdles you have to overcome in developing that?
Paul: It was a huge, huge challenge. We knew it was a super-important feature for having co-op really work. When you have to sort of stop playing and go back to menus and search server lists and all that kind of stuff, we knew it would create such a huge barrier. People would try it once maybe, and if they weren’t successful in the first two minutes, they’d never try it ever again. We knew it was worth taking on that challenge. It’s worth noting that there are some things we could be doing that we’ve sacrificed in order to ensure that feature works. We basically keep track of the entire world state for each character, so that when I join your game I’m playing in your world, but you’re not ****ing up my world other than getting to keep the stuff you find here. All these things that a lot of other developers have just gone (eh, nevermind. We don’t want to go there.) It’s really challenging and it’s super awesome that we tackled that and have been successful. I’ve had some colleagues at other studios get in touch with me after Borderlands shipped and asked (How the hell did you guys do this?) That’s one of our competitive advantages, I think, is that we’ve been able to tackle this kind of thing. Especially in an RPG. How many co-op RPGs can you name? That’s another reason Borderlands has been so successful. We heard all kinds of stories like, (I play shooters but my wife likes RPGs. We got Borderlands and we’ve now been playing for hundreds and hundreds of hours together. It scratches her itch for RPGs and I love the shooting part. We’re one big happy family.)
Jonathan: I don’t want to speak to the technical stuff, as there’s a ton of it. Everything you design, you have to keep co-op in mind. I think the reason we were successful is because we made a decision very early on in which we said (this is a co-op game.) That is the foundation, and then every time a question comes up, you always have to say (okay, but what about co-op?) Throughout the whole development process, we always spent time and attention making sure all those things worked. I think one of the difficulties is that a lot of games might not start from that foundation, and once you’ve built 30% of the game you can’t think (oh, you know what would be great? Co-op!) That would actually mean undoing a lot of the work that you did. We were very lucky to make sure that we built that foundation from day one.
Paul: We never would have been able to do the drop-in, drop-out if we hadn’t decided that the very first day. We couldn’t get a couple months out and have someone say (This game isn’t gonna do anything unless we get co-op!) That’s how you end up with a lot of the half-assed implementations. I’m sure that’s what happened with most developers. They didn’t want to end up there, but they didn’t plan on it. That has also been another big advantage that we have.
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