Playing Together: Co-Op in PC FPS Games

Posted Nov 11th 2008 4:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Features, FPS, Left 4 Dead

If you like your games to have full co-op mode in the single player campaign then this year is a good time to be a fan of PC first person shooters. This week developer Treyarch and publisher Activision release Call of Duty: World at War, which finally adds co-op support for the first time in the series. Next week is even bigger as Valve finally releases the full version of Left 4 Dead, a game designed from the ground up to be a co-op shooter.

Today we look back at the history of co-op gameplay in first person shooter titles.The genre actually had quite a few games that supported such features when it first started but the last few years have seen a decline as FPS have emphasised more popular multiplayer features like deathmatch, CTF and more recently big team based gameplay. But with Call of Duty: World at War and Left 4 Dead out this month co-op gameplay may be coming back.

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Gallery: Playing Together: Co-Op In PC FPS Games

Tags: call-of-duty-world-at-war, doom, featured, gears-of-war, joystiqfeatures, left-4-dead, left-4-dead-demo, left-4-dead-pc-demo, quake, rainbow-six, unreal

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Doom had a co-op mod? Maybe I'm wrong but I thought it was built directly into the game? Or did that not begin until Doom II?Posted at 9:30PM on Nov 16th 2008 by indigit4l

Doom (and Doom II) did not have any multiplayer built into them, mods where made available that allowed for death match and co-op.Posted at 2:25AM on Nov 17th 2008 by Snwbrds2922

The original doom came with an executable called 'dwango.exe' that allowed 4 player coop or deathmatch. It did not include any deathmatch specific maps, but each map had additional spawn points and items that only appeared in a deathmatch game.Posted at 11:30AM on Nov 17th 2008 by kaneda26

All the original Dooms had multiplayer. They all had COOP and Deathmatch. The difference there is that before Quake they didn't have built in internet multiplayer. You had to set up games locally (LAN) or use a third party utility such as DWANGO to play them over dialup.

None of the old DOS games seemed to have you setup a mutliplayer game using the in game menus like you do today however. When you are doing a LAN game you typically have to use their setup.exe program. Again it wasn't until Quake that that happened. With any modern port however you can setup a multiplayer game just like you can any modern game.

Doom 3 on the other hand didn't have a COOP mode built in and had mods where made in order for it to have it.

The game that didn't have any multiplayer at all was the original Wolfenstein 3D.Posted at 8:10PM on Nov 17th 2008 by smoke_tetsu