Co-op review

[Staninja]

I've been playing co-op with my wife for about a week now and figured I'd give a little review for anyone thinking of trying it out. This is not a review of the game as a whole - just co-op.

First off, its a bit of a mixed bag. The fact it actually has co-op and open world co-op to boot is great. The problem however is in how it works and how many bugs exist.

Pros:
- It has co-op :) - I play all games with my wife; if it isn't co-op I don't buy it.
- Open world co-op :-) - Not many open world co-op games around period.
- It's better than the Far Cry 3 co-op campaign (although more buggy) - a step in the right direction at least.
- Vehicles (except the glider) as designed with co-op in mind.
- The game has its fun moments for sure.


Cons:
- The campaign doesn't work in co-op. co-op only works for the open world stuff.

- You can't play co-op right away. Both co-op players must complete the campaign up to I think the 7th mission. If you know the mechanics and don't get distracted you can get that far in under 90min. Still I found it annoying to have to play single player to access co-op.

- Drop-in/drop-out is questionable: typically this would imply someone be able to join your game after its already loaded - not having to join together in a lobby before starting the game. Technically this is the case - however because certain game mechanics aren't available in co-op your game actually reloads when your partner enters or leaves the game. This cancels anything your doing, resets the game world and teleports you back to the nearest town market. I don't consider that drop-in.

- The skill tree is locked by single player campaign missions. About 3/4 of the end branch abilities in the skill tree can only be accessed after completing certain campaign missions. So if you want any upper end skills you have to play more single player.

- Quests, world status, most goals and unlocks are not shared to the co-op partner. This is almost a game breaking limitation of the co-op implementation. Only the host gets credit for completing open world quests and events. Loot, XP and Karma are shared but not much else. Most weapons and some skills are unlocked from completing X quests of a certain type. Your partner won't benefit from this. Thus if you're like me and I host the game and my wife joins she'll never unlock anything. We've been forced to switch who hosts the game each night to keep us both progressing. This means we keep repeating the same things - getting the same towers, liberating the same outposts, doing the same static hub quests.

- co-op bugs! There are a lot of bugs in this game to begin with but when playing co-op they're difficult to ignore. The bugs are so common you'd be hard pressed to make it through an evening of play without encountering a few of them and most of the time you really just have to try to ignore the ones you can otherwise you'd have to quit out and start again so often it wouldn't be worth it.
- About 1/4 of what you see in the world your partner won't. This is really obvious if your partner does the driving. You'll watch them drive over and through vehicles and people regularly. Those obstacles are not in their instance of the game though. Even if you tell them to stop its not like the game will catch-up and the people will appear. Fortunately hitting these obstacles doesn't cause damage or loss of karma. Likewise you'll encounter world quests related vehicles and enemies that seem frozen and you can't interfact with. You can't complete them and they block other instances of the same quest from spawning in the world until they disappear.
- Any cutscenes (happens after liberating anything) causes a bug where your partner's health state becomes locked if they weren't at full health. You basically have to quit out to fix it, which in turn reloads the world.
- Sometimes a quest will get into a weird state where you can't complete it. Again you have to quit out to force a reset of the world state to fix the problem. I've actually had quests I've had to do 3 or 4 times because it just wouldn't complete.


Overview:
Its hard to give Far Cry 4 a good co-op review because there are just so many limitations and bugs. The game was clearly not designed with the idea of you and a friend or partner sitting down and playing the game together cooperatively as your sole approach to the game. Really the game is meant to be played solo and when you reach a fort or a tough quest you recruit a friend for 10min to help you complete it and then go back to solo.

[ricmadeira]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to write all that. I was really looking forward to the co-op but those are some pretty crappy limitations. :(

[DarrenTheBstard]

well at least your well endowed for your missus's sake anyway..because after the farcry 4 coop i see she will need it man!!

[Hadji]

Good and a pretty spot on review. I have a few things that I think should be mentioned as well:

* Tethering - you are always limited regarding how far you can get from your co-op partner before the guest gets teleported to the host. This is pretty annoying if one player tries to support the other from the air using a Buzzer since it is very easy to get too far away (which isn't very far...) from eachother.

* Northern Kyrat - You mention the Act 1 issue and this is equally true for accessing Northern Kyrat (half of the map area) since that requires single player missions to unlock. This means some fortresses and other co-op activities can't be reached until you spend quite some time in single player.

I am one of those players who loves co-op and it IS fun in FC4. Problem is that it feels like it was thrown in at the end of the design process. To be honest I can't understand why they didn't make a full co-op story available.

[Staninja]

Thanks for adding the additional issues. It should help other people decide if its worth getting.

My wife and I just finished all of the main area and want to enter Northern Kyrat, but of course can't unless we want to go back to single player :(

[Hadji]

My gaming buddy and me are in the same situation. 4+ hours in SP and I still haven't unlocked Northern Kyrat. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? I'm doing Golden Path missions and Amita and Sabal missions mainly. I have also done a couple of missions for "X" (won't mention who for spolier reasons) who appears after a while.

[Staninja]

I haven't unlocked it yet either, but I haven't played much single player yet, so you're likely way ahead of me. My understanding is you have to complete the Amite/Sabal quest chain, which is 4 missions either way, but there may be missions in-between that also have to be completed to progress that chain.

[Pabl00]

do you know if similar cooperation as we have in FC3 for 4 players will be added to FC4?

[Cheechako]

Originally posted by Staninja:

- Quests, world status, most goals and unlocks are not shared to the co-op partner. This is almost a game breaking limitation of the co-op implementation. Only the host gets credit for completing open world quests and events. Loot, XP and Karma are shared but not much else. Most weapons and some skills are unlocked from completing X quests of a certain type. Your partner won't benefit from this. Thus if you're like me and I host the game and my wife joins she'll never unlock anything. We've been forced to switch who hosts the game each night to keep us both progressing. This means we keep repeating the same things - getting the same towers, liberating the same outposts, doing the same static hub quests.

I'm curious if you could play a session, quit both games, and then copy the host save files over to the other computer which will leave you with the same completion status. In theory, you could also play solo to unlock co-op and then copy that save over to another computer.

[Staninja]

Originally posted by Pabl00:

do you know if similar cooperation as we have in FC3 for 4 players will be added to FC4?

Of course I can't say for sure what their plans are, however given the already existing Open World co-op design I doubt they'll provide content similar to FC3. On the other hand it wouldn't be difficult for them to have DLC that adds new and more complex missions meant specifically for co-op.

[Staninja]

Originally posted by Cheechako:

I'm curious if you could play a session, quit both games, and then copy the host save files over to the other computer which will leave you with the same completion status. In theory, you could also play solo to unlock co-op and then copy that save over to another computer.

I never tried so I really can't say.

At this point we've completed all the missions in co-op for both my game and my wife's. I have to admit that the back and forth between games really detracted from the experience and there was a certain amount of forced effort for us to accept this just to get our money's worth out of the game.

The other problem we encountered was the ease of completing most of the content. This is even more true once you unlock some of the more powerful weapons. The Buzzsaw for instance can pretty much demolist an army of men, animals and vehicles with little effort. The only way to make it hard was to try to take all outposts and forts without alerting anyone.

[Søn of Jøn]

I'm just curious - when you play co-op, does it connect both players' machines via a Uplay server, or are you connected directly to each other through a LAN-like setup?

[Stalk]

Off -topic Coop:

Have you ever tried System Shock 2 as coop?

Also the Devs have painted themselves into a corner by designing the story lines from a single player aspect even though they can make up a story about the 2nd person would be a "hired hand" and make it so they play the campaign as a true team. (Or you marry Amita...)

I would love to play the CAMPAIGN in full with a close friend but no, no imagination on the Dev's part.

Sad.

[Staninja]

Originally posted by Oblivious:

I'm just curious - when you play co-op, does it connect both players' machines via a Uplay server, or are you connected directly to each other through a LAN-like setup?

The invite works through Uplay but the host is running the server in their current game session on their local machine. So it's a LAN connection between machines or an direct internet connection if your friend isn't inside your firewall.

[Staninja]

Originally posted by Stalk:

Off -topic Coop:

Have you ever tried System Shock 2 as coop?

Also the Devs have painted themselves into a corner by designing the story lines from a single player aspect even though they can make up a story about the 2nd person would be a "hired hand" and make it so they play the campaign as a true team. (Or you marry Amita...)

I would love to play the CAMPAIGN in full with a close friend but no, no imagination on the Dev's part.

Sad.

System Shock 2 co-op was Awesome! The game wasn't meant to be co-op when it was released but had the networking built into it. The company did a bad job promoting the game and had no copy protection and consequently went bankrupt despite System Shock 2 being one of the best games of its time. Before closing up shop they released a patch which added the co-op. It was quirky but still worked for the most part and despite the story being single player centrix it didn't detract from it at all and added tons of replay value to the game.

[Søn of Jøn]

Originally posted by Staninja:

The invite works through Uplay but the host is running the server in their current game session on their local machine. So it's a LAN connection between machines or an direct internet connection if your friend isn't inside your firewall.

Thanks.
I was just wondering if the bugs, such as the health bug for one, are possibly caused by a failure of the two PCs synching with each other, as opposed to a failure in the coding of the information being shared.

In other words, a hiccup in the connection triggered by either specific occurrences in the code, or caused by a bug in the communication between the machines.