Left 4 Dead Creator Mike Booth Believes There Should Be More Co-Op Games

thegamer.com:

The creator of Left 4 Dead, Mike Booth, wants there to be more co-op experiences. With games like Deep Rock Galactic, It Takes Two, and most recently The Anacrusis, there have already been a profusion of these in the last couple of years, but the designer sees plenty of room for expansion.

Booth discussed the future of co-op games along with a variety of other topics during an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. He had quite a few interesting insights.

While the pandemic has resulted in people being online for longer periods of time, the designer doesn’t see this fact as being behind the recent boom in co-op games. Booth believes that people have been searching for the experiences offered by co-op games for years. In his opinion, the pandemic just accelerated the trend towards being constantly online.

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"You know, we talked about some of my previous titles, some of that was 12 years ago," he said. "Now, we have gigabit broadband internet connections to each other. The things we can do now are insane. It's just wonderful technology-wise. I think people are like 'well, why can't we do this? Why are you not letting us do this?' And the answer is that it's complicated. It's hard."

Booth pointed out that co-op games require a special approach. "Game designers have to think in that way and make things replayable,” he noted. “I think for what we're talking about here, you need to make things that are more procedural and more replayable so that you can have a destination that people come back to over and over again like a hangout. I think those sorts of games are going to be more and more in demand in the future."

"I think the challenge is that it's hard to make a co-op game,” Booth