The Impact Factor

Couch Co-Op: No Second Controller Required

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Abstract: Fewer split- and shared screen co-operative games are released each year. The same holds true for local multiplayer games in general. For my girlfriend, Justine, and I, we needed a new type of co-operative experience to fill the ever widening void: and we have, with shared story games. Played with a single controller, games like Tales from the Borderlands and Heavy Rain provide the two of us equal agency in shaping our time with the game. Straightforward game systems allow the focus to be solely on the characters and story, and have made these shared story games some of our most memorable gaming experiences in the past few years. We have found a new kind of couch co-op, no second controller required.

Couch co-operative video games, played with a single controller, have been some of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I’ve had in the past couple years. Yeah, you read that right. I love playing co-op games using just one controller. How you might ask? That’s what I’m here to tell you.

The release of Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands’ third episode this past week inspired me to start this piece. Telltale has been knocking it out of the park in the past few years with their excellent The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and yes, Tales from the Borderlands. Telltale takes the foundation upon which many of the adventure games were built, and provides character-driven dramas (and comedies!) that through great dialogue choices and big decisions, allow the player to have sublime agency in how each games’ story is told. In some sense, Telltale games are the truest interpretation of a choose-your-own-adventure book in video game form. I cannot get enough of them. And the best part? I get to share these stories, these crucial dialogue options and game altering decision moments with my girlfriend and partner-in-crime, Justine. That’s what I’ve written about here today.

Let me take a quick step back for a moment. Justine and I love playing all kinds of games together. Some of our favorite experiences have been with loot-based co-operative games, like Diablo 3. We got pretty deep into Diablo. I, as a mage, and her, as a barbarian, kicked ass and took names all throughout the story and a good way into a second playthrough. Another, one of our favorites to date, was the time went spent with Borderlands 2. I played through the first game in the Borderlands series solo, having picked it up on the cheap through some PSN sale. As a fan of RPGs, shooters, and comedy, Borderlands and I instantly clicked. Exploring the chaotic and wonderful Pandora, cracking open loot chests, blowing up skaggs and rakks. All of it worked. But Borderlands was a game that was built from the ground up as a co-op experience and, during my playthrough, I certainly felt it. The second game came at the perfect time, since Justine and I were searching for a game we would play through together. Borderlands 2 allowed the two of us to play through the entire campaign in split-screen. It was fantastic. The two of us sunk easily over 150 hours into the game: we got through two full playthroughs on our main characters, including several of the DLCs, as well as another playthrough with a different set of characters. For two months or so, Borderlands 2 was our evening routine.

Sure, it was kind of hard to see stuff at times, but split-screen Borderlands 2 was an absolute blast.

These two controller co-op experiences are phenomenal. It allowed me to share my time with these great games with someone for whom I care so deeply. Split-screen co-op gaming is something that we haven’t gotten to do so often. And, if trends hold, it will be an increasingly small part of our lives as time goes on. For years now, games that allow this kind of co-op gameplay are growing fewer and fewer in number. With an emphasis on increased graphical fidelity and detail-rich graphics, gaming consoles would buckle under the colossal weight of trying to run two instances of the game at the same time. A game like Borderlands 2 can get away with this because it has stylized cell-shaded graphics. It’s not trying to recapitulate reality or try to cross the uncanny valley. What that means for Justine and I, though, is in any given year we have access to only a small handful of titles to play two-controller co-operatively.

New AAA games generally provide co-op as an online-only mode. If each player has their own copy of the game, on their own system, all the network has to do is throw them together on the same server and they’re good to go. Online co-op is all well and fine, but in my case and I’m sure in many others, it doesn’t perfectly supplant the feeling you have playing together in a shared screen experience. Bungie’s Destiny is a title that really marked the death of split-screen experiences, for me. I was excited for Destiny ever since I first learned of it. What’s not to love about a sci-fi co-op FPS-RPG hybrid from the studio that created Halo? (Unfortunately after having played it, the answer to that question is ‘quite a lot of things,’ but that’s really not the point of this article) As time went on, I got more and more excited to play through Destiny with Justine just like I had with Borderlands 2. Bungie had a long track record of having great split-screen co-op support with their previous titles. So, naively, I expected it to be the same here. In the end, it was not the case. I was not able to play Destiny with Justine. Maybe I would have played it longer if I had. Destiny is just an example of how the games space is changing. I expect to see only fewer split-screen, or even shared screen, co-op experiences in the future.

No local multiplayer? No go. We had been looking forward to it, too. 

I’m certainly not the only one who noticed that games you could play together in-person were slowly fading away. Aside from Nintendo, who continues to produce quality ‘couch multiplayer’ games, so many developers and publishers have moved away from these kinds of experiences in recent years. Recognizing this deficit, and fueled by the creative freedom independent publishing affords them, indie developers have taken over the mantle of local multiplayer experiences. With excellent titles like Sportsfriends, Towerfall Ascension, Nidhogg, & Starwhal (just to name a few of the many), indie devs have pin-pointed what makes local multiplayer games fun and concentrated them into great, compact experiences. And these games are fantastic. Unfortunately, they don’t address the key missing piece for Justine and I. All the above games are competitive in nature. When the two of us want to game together, 9 times out of 10 we would rather work together than compete.

Towerfall Ascension is a lot of fun. Generally though, I'd rather be shooting arrows
with Justine, not at her.

So that left the two of us with a dilemma. If two-player couch co-op experiences are disappearing, and the games that appear to be replacing them emphasize competition rather than co-operation, what are our options? We can we look to for that shared gaming experience? Thankfully, we did not have to look far. We found shared story experiences, or like the title of this article suggests, two player co-op where no second controller is required.

Justine and I have found our niche in these ‘shared story experience games’. I use this vague term because, well, the games we play single controller co-operatively wear a bunch of different hats. Adventure game, point-and-click, cinematic action game, you name it. But what’s shared between these kinds of games is what’s important—and that is this powerful feeling of agency, where our moment to moment decisions are the main driving force behind how the game progresses. We first discovered how much we enjoyed this single controller co-op experience with Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 1. Playing through The Walking Dead was phenomenal: the two of us jointly decided to make the tough dialogue decisions, game changing scenario choices, and puzzle solving. Throughout our entire playthrough the two of us are talking, whether it be what to do next, whether the choice we made was best, or what we think of the characters’ motivations. After having such a wonderful time, we wanted more. And we found that with more Telltale games: The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead S2, Game of Thrones, and Tales from the Borderlands. Pretty much everything Telltale has put out lately. But even after all those, we still searched for more experiences that gave us that co-op feeling. We found and enjoyed David Cage’s PS3 outings: Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. What we love most about these games, whether they are from Telltale or Quantic Dream or any other developer, is that no matter which of us is holding the controller both Justine and I feel like we have an equal hand in shaping our playthrough. Our decisions and our teamwork are the game, less so the button presses or game systems.

You can bet that Justine and I were torn over the many tough decisions
we made in The Walking Dead.

Games like The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain are often criticized because they are just QTE (quick time event) fests. Some bemoan that those kind of games have “no gameplay.” I have a feeling that those people don’t understand what these titles are trying to accomplish, frankly. The absence of more involved or ‘standard’ game systems allows these games to focus on story and characters.  Of the many games I’ve played, The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain have stories that have stayed with me far longer than so many others. And that’s due in large part to how the ‘simple’ gameplay systems emphasize dialogue, characters and story. Often, extra game systems detract from a cohesive and memorable story. Just to give a quick example: I love Final Fantasy 6. But even today, I can only remember bits and pieces of the story. All the time I spent outside of story quests, battling monsters or flying around the overworld or doing side quests, dilutes the narrative. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It works so well for so many games. But for something like The Walking Dead, where Telltale clearly put so much work into creating an interesting story with compelling characters, it wants, almost demands, you remember it. The gameplay reinforces this idea. Aside from maybe wanting another puzzle or two, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Heavy Rain and shared story games are so much more than the sum of their gameplay.

Shared story experiences, a.k.a. single controller co-op games, were our solution to a growing problem. Games like Tales from the Borderlands have allowed Justine & I to have more to play together. They also let us tell these fun, hand-crafted stories that are unlike anything we have played before. Are we excited for more two-controller co-op experiences? You bet. Battleborne is one of our most anticipated games this fall (if early information is correct and we will be able to play split-screen). But we’re also excited to have more shared story experiences we can play together as a team. Because we’re a team. The next episode of Tales from the Borderlands cannot come soon enough!

Onwards to our single controller co-op filled future!