Teamwork: Important?

[Nanor]

How far would you agree that teamwork makes the game, or at least helps in a major way?

I'll throw out an example; Battlefield 2. BF2 was the epitome of teamwork. Squads ran about seriously depending on each other. For example, say you're running around and a tank runs around the corner, you call for an AT who then takes out the tank and everything is great until you're killed when you call for a medic who revives you and you go off to take the point.

Another example. How about Company of Heroes? The game where you had to co-ordinate. One player went armour, the other infantry and the other Airborne. You'd be defending your point and in rolled a Tiger and you yelled "Airborne! I need an AT drop here!". Dropped it was and the Tiger was killed as you all rolled on together in a glorious counter attack rolling over the chassis of the Tiger and the dead bodies of the Wehrmacht destroying anything in your way.

It benefits to have a clan to play with as it heightens the experience when you can all work together as a team to achieve victory. Teamwork makes the game.

Right...?

Well take for example Call of Duty 4. It's a good game, don't get me wrong, but it's no BF2. Not even close. Ask yourself, how much teamwork is involved in Call of Duty 4. I'm not talking about a team mate telling you were the enemy is, I'm talking where you actually need a team mate to survive, where you need your team mate to use their particular trait to get rid of the obstacle ahead? No where really. So in CoD4 all I'm doing is running around looking for people to kill with no real need for the team mate by my side, unlike in BF2 where I need the medic beside me in case my fat ass hits the ground and I need some juice to get me going.

So what am I getting at here? The team work makes the game. If I have no need for my team mate, as in I need him to survive, I'm not having fun. I can turn around and say to Piacular "Hey Pia, remember the time we were playing Zatar Wetlands and you got shot but I revived you and we took the hill, but a tank came along? Luckily enough Wraith spawned and took it out just in time until that chopper game along. Thank God for Midge in his plane that took it out..."

What can I say to Bob or Trax? Nothing really. There have been no moments of camaraderie and teamwork where I needed them and as a result have nothing to relate to them with. I love BF2 and CoH because we had such great laughs looking back. Even now on X-Fire, Pia and I are talking about the memories of CoH. The time we had to work together to achieve victory. What happens when CoD dies? What will I be able to talk to Bob about? What will I be able to laugh at with Ronin about? Nothing... because I never needed them. We have nothing to talk about but the endless walking around corners and shooting. I've never had a moment where I had to hide by a ditch and call for a team mate to save my ass in CoD, but I have in BF2.

As I said earlier:
"It benefits to have a clan to play with as it heightens the experience when you can all work together as a team to achieve victory. Teamwork makes the game.

Right...?"

Right.

 

[DocBot]

Ns needed more teamwork than BF2...

I agree with everything else.

 

[Nanor]

I never played NS so I can't really comment on that.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Working from the standpoint that we're talking about online multiplayer games, and thereby excluding from this discussion the excellent fun to be had with beautifully crafted singleplayer experiences such as Portal, Fahrenheit or Max Payne...

I feel that there are different levels to this notion of "teamwork".

There's a sense of smooth cooperation one finds when a squad gels together in a shooter that supports squad dynamics (BF2, Planetside, etc). This can come together in a pick up group but more often comes out of playing with people you already know and have had chance to work a bit on getting it together.

There's also a sense of camaraderie that comes from playing with community or clan mates that can be had in many team games, especially when played as a group against the world.

Then there's those times where both turn up together.

If I'm playing an online team game and one of the two above isn't present then I lose my way within a couple of hours. Sure, there's the highs and lows of personal achievement but without cooperation or camaraderie I find no higher sense of gain.

Now, I feel that the camaraderie side is easier to reach when part of a community such as THN. We can have a laugh or two at the time just playing whatever, especially if we don't treat it too seriously so that the better players aren't just continually pwning the less experienced players. Cooperation usually needs to be worked at, though. Personal practice to improve one's own skills and practice as a group to figure out how to respond to each other's requests, strengths, weaknesses are both vital to get cooperation nailed down.

When Planetside was new, I used to do a fair bit of squad leading. It was hard work holding a pick up group together over the course of, say, four hours and still remain effective and active but once that was rolling it was pretty awesome. It helped that I had Rojaws in the same room as me, playing a MAX, so I could rely on her to hold a particular point (usually the command room) while I directed the rest of the squad around her as a pivot.

If I had to choose one aspect, I'd choose cooperation, partly because I know that it's easy enough to fall back on camaraderie here anyhow, but largely because the biggest highs are from achieving through cooperation what you couldn't achieve by yourself. And that's where CoD4 and Counter Strike and games of that ilk don't quite cut it, in the final analysis, despite being excellent in other areas; on a really good day, when I'm playing my very best, the rest of my team is nearly optional, relegated to distractions so that I can pwn everything I see. Doesn't happen often these days, I find, but I've had to apologise for my insane reactions on CS Source before now 'cause they seemed like I was aimbotting. If I can do it by myself, where's the thrill of achieving something great than myself?

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

It's a good point, but it all depends on the game. Certainly, I love teamwork games a hell of a lot, nothing beats the warm fuzzy feeling of rushing in and rescuing teamies, or being on your own, under fire and all but dead, and then a teammate comes around the corner in a tank and saves the day.

However, I think it's unfair to say that teamwork is a prerequisite of a great game, and Call of Duty 4 is probably a half decent example of this. The only thing to be said for teamwork in that game is to hope that your teammates can fend for themselves, whilst they are hoping for the same about you, but that doesn't spoil anything for me. A lot of the time I most enjoy myself when I do a little solo Uzi rush, or snipe across bridges, and I think to put an emphasis on teamwork in those kind of situations is completely missing the point. Also, CoD4 is a lot less frustrating in that respect because, if you die, you can think to yourself 'Ah, that's what I did wrong there. Next time I'll try something different and learn from it' whereas if you get, say, bombed by a jet in BF you're not thinking 'Damn, I should've gone Anti Tank' you're thinking 'I'm an assault! Where the hell is my anti-air!?!'.
Call of Duty 4 puts more of the responsibility for your own life in your own hands, whereas BF2 spreads the responsibility (almost) evenly around your squad, so in the former you feel like you have a lot more control over your experience and performance in the game, which can quite often a be a big benefit over relying on teamplay.

Obviously teamplay is your kind of thing, Nanor, but I prefer a mix of both and right now the lone-wolfishness of CoD4 is really enjoyable for me. That, by the way, is another reason I play as 'jimbob jones' or any one of its derivatives ; sticking it to the man, from the man, rather than bogging myself down with covering and tactics.

 

[Nanor]

It's just that I personally feel that Battlefield 2 is a better game than CoD4. The only thing really missing (apart from vehicles, but I never used them much) is team play. This just leads me to believe that, for me anyway, team play makes a better game.

I've never really seen the point of a lone wolf style play in multi-player games. The only advantage is that if you sneak around and knife someone in multi-player rather than single-player games is that you outsmarted a real person. Otherwise you may as well play an SP game because your team mates are superfluous.

The advantages of less teamwork focused games like CoD4 is I've found they're easier to jump in and play. I can hope on CoD4 for half an hour before I go to bed and not need to get bogged down in a game before I feel like I've made the time worthwhile. BF2 on the other hand really required you to play for an hour or two before you felt like it was worthwhile. Project Reality, well it needed considerably more than 2 hours before it felt like it was worthwhile. But I find that I get more enjoyment out of games that take a long time. PR was great, because it saw all of us working in unison to achieve victory, even if it did take about 4 hours.

So I guess I've found teamwork games are more of a play for a while affair while less teamwork games are pick up and play.

 

[Haven]

I think teamplay is designed into a game as a requirement, but usually most multiplayer games are very non-teamplay friendly by necessity to avoid griefing. A good example of this was the commander chair in NS ... a key component to the teamplay element and often horrendously abused by griefers who would sell everything and end a game. For this reason few games have teamplay as a requirement.

Enforcing teamplay is very very difficult especially given the average age and maturity of most online gamers hence its not really a requirement in most games and often the teamplay comes down to the sum of all random individual achievements rather than elements that demand more than a single player to complete. Imagine not being able to kill anyone else unless 2+ people combined weapons ... or not being able to capture a point/objective until 5+ people all focussed their concentration on it - and became vulnerable to kills whilst they did so, thereby encouraging defense for easy kills ...

That would be a teamplay game, all games I can think of now other than raids/instaces in world of warcraft are just a collection of lone gunmen on the same side.

I'm deliberately focussing on the gameplay mechanics here as a requirement to enforce co-operation. Social gaming whether required or not by the game mechanics is a personal choice - some people (like those on THN) choose to actively teamplay and socialise. I don't see this as the norm though.

 

[Dragon]

Ns needed more teamwork than BF2...

NS was and is TEAMWORK but I agree to Nanor ... thats why I quickly stopped playing games like CS etc... without teamwork ... it is simply boring. Then I can go and kill some bots. Then I won't have teamwork either, but I also don't have any "cheater"-flaming etc and sometimes bots are even more challenging than human players ("What the F*** how did he know I was there")

 

[PsiSoldier]

You can employ teamwork in any game really, but in the end it comes to one thing, are you doing it for the team, or for the assist points?

PS: Planetside = teamwork

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

but in the end it comes to one thing, are you doing it for the team, or for the assist points?

Yes, that is true For BF2142, definitely the assist points