How does co-op work?

[GhostOokami]

Two friends and I are looking for a new co-op experience and this has come up a few times. One of my friends though says he heard about the co-op being a little strange, i guess he heard that one player needs to have beaten the game or seen the cutscenes or....something. Honestly it sounds really strange to me but if the three of us got the game would we be able to jump into the game together with no prior experience?

[Balkoth]

Basically, every story mission has a cutscene in it. Once you see the cutscene you can invite your friend mid-mission.

Yeah, it's weird and dumb, but that's how they did it.

[Greb]

The story is a tutorial, and comes with cutscenes which can't be skipped and often the quests require you to play solo for a little while until you meet the monster you're tracking and see the exposition. Once you've witnessed the monster, you're allowed to call for backup.

The method to use is play alongside your friends, and each time you undertake a new Assignment quest, all go in together in solo and then meet the monster, and then return to the Gathering Hub and then relaunch the mission again, this time you'll all be able to join up and handle it together.

It's a pain for sure, but it's dealable. There's only something like 50 Assignments across vanilla and Iceborne DLC, that's a lot of times you'll have to mess around with the "meet the monster first!" annoyance, but it's actually (hopefully) a tiny portion of the amount of hunts you'll be doing in total though, which won't have the annoying stuff to deal with.

Remember that the Assignments portion of the game make up a teeny tiny amount of the actual gameplay, and they're the only quests with temporary solo requirements - the rest of the game has no unskippable cutscenes or multiplayer restrictions (except Investigations but that's another story)

I hope that makes sense. It's unorthodox but eventually it runs smoothly, I promise!

[Tregrenos]

Originally posted by Balkoth:

Basically, every story mission has a cutscene in it. Once you see the cutscene you can invite your friend mid-mission.

Yeah, it's weird and dumb, but that's how they did it.

You can also both "Return From Mission" after the cutscene and enter at the same time since you only need to see the cutscene once. Despite the butthurts like this you'll find on these forums, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for the sake of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, you'll spend roughly less than 2% of your time in-game setting through a cutscene. To put a number to this, the total time for every cutscene in the game combined is around 4 hours and you'll hit the 100 hour mark before you realize how much time has passed in this game.

[Kaz]

so for co op for this game. all you need to do is do a few quest early on and then you guys can play together. its just all tutorial stuff so itll be like one or two quest you guys will have to do solo. its not too hard. the npc will also tell you about shooting a flare and that flare is to allow other irl players to join you. dont have to shoot a flare if youre in the same session\lobby. and yes you guys can do everything together and do the story at the same time. only thing with that is that you all will have to see the cutscene first when it comes to the story. so 2 of you would have to see the cutscenes and then those two can just join the third guy after he see's the cutscenes and when you guys finish it then the quest will finish for all 3 of you. you guys dont need to beat the game but just see the cutscenes.

[Balkoth]

Originally posted by Tregrenos:

Originally posted by Balkoth:

Basically, every story mission has a cutscene in it. Once you see the cutscene you can invite your friend mid-mission.

Yeah, it's weird and dumb, but that's how they did it.

You can also both "Return From Mission" after the cutscene and enter at the same time since you only need to see the cutscene once. Despite the butthurts like this you'll find on these forums, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for the sake of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, you'll spend roughly less than 2% of your time in-game setting through a cutscene. To put a number to this, the total time for every cutscene in the game combined is around 4 hours and you'll hit the 100 hour mark before you realize how much time has passed in this game.

Take a nap buddy. We're all chill here.

[JebKerman]

Originally posted by Tregrenos:

Originally posted by Balkoth:

Basically, every story mission has a cutscene in it. Once you see the cutscene you can invite your friend mid-mission.

Yeah, it's weird and dumb, but that's how they did it.

... Despite the butthurts like this you'll find on these forums, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for the sake of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ...

It's fair criticism, not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

It's a clunky way to handle multiple players playing through the story assignments together that unfortunately isn't going to be smoothed out for this game. You get past that stage, sure, but that doesn't invalidate the criticisms levelled at it.

Hopefully they can take said criticism on board and have a smoother experience in the next one.