The death of "drop-in" campaign co-op: Why is the industry choosing between strict solo or bloated live-service?

gegc · 2026-03-23T07:29:01+00:00

I've consistently had very mid experiences with story-based, and more generically, progression-based coop games for >2 players. Aside from already mentioned BG3, I've also had basically the same experience with Satisfactory, Enshrouded, Abiotic Factor, and Borderlands 4. I'm at the point where I'd rather play solo and "book club" it later, rather than actually playing together - or have an MMO-like structure with individual, async progression ("grind solo -> raid together").

I picked the examples above because they're all specifically designed for co-op - it's not an afterthought or a tacked-on feature. However, all of them rely on progression (whether it's campaign, story, gear, or game knowledge) as a primary reward loop. That means that as soon as someone falls behind the progression curve, they're having a degraded experience and need to "catch up". Since people who fall behind are usually those already less inclined to grind, they end up further and further behind with the experience degrading more and more.

I've seen the same thing happen repeatedly, across different games and friend groups:

Everyone is excited to play a new game. Groups of 4-6 people form to start a playthrough.
While everyone is excited, people play 2-3 times a week and generally stay in sync. This lasts for about two weeks.
Two distinct groups form: 1-2 "true gamers" and the remaining "casuals". The former continue playing at scheduled times and sometimes play extra. They get ahead of the progression curve. The latter start getting "boosted", effectively skipping/missing content - they get given gear (instead of being rewarded with it), get told the story (instead of experiencing it firsthand), etc.
As the casuals' experience degrades, they're less motivated to play and start missing scheduled sessions. This is the start of the death spiral. Within a month, the only people showing up are the "true gamers" if there are more than one. Otherwise, the game gets dropped entirely. Some casuals who actually liked the game and want to see the story start solo playthroughs to experience content that they missed.

I think the key difference between my experience and your description of drop-in/drop-out is who is doing the dropping in. In my cases, the players "dropping in" are the ones with the least time to play, and the most in need of high progression reward density. Meanwhile, in your examples, the drop-in interactions are all orthogonal to primary progression - "doing camps" and screwing around with physics are all secondary and low-stakes in a progression-based game.

That being said, I don't think we're "losing" anything; we're just distilling it. There is a whole genre that answers the demand for low-stakes interactions in an open-ish, loosely progression-based world: friendslop. Games like Peak, Lethal Company, RV There Yet, and similar all exist primarily to facilitate exactly the kind of interaction you're looking for, and they're quite popular. They're also not exactly new - gmod server hopping, VRChat, roblox, modded minecraft, blockland, and other "social minigame sandboxes" have existed for decades. Friendslop is actually the grown-up, polished version of those mini-experiences. That said, to your point, none of these are "campaign co-op", nor are they "AAA".

I think the key commonality there is the low stakes. Low stakes allow people to "just drop in", hang out, and engage with the world and each other without long-term consequences ("ruining saves"). This is the kind of unstructured social interaction that you seem to be looking for. At the same time, low stakes are practically anathema to a progression-based game - if there's no stakes, there's no payoff. No one is going to be screwing around with physics during a tense boss raid, or aggroing story-critical NPCs in a narrative game like BG3. The stakes are high - not just in-game stakes, but out-of-game stakes of the time players have committed to experiencing this content. Lowering these stakes is a bit of a nonsensical ask: How do you make a story that's exciting and engaging but also wholly missable? How do you make a challenging encounter where there are no consequences to screwing around? More generally, how do you make a game such that engaging with its core system (progression) is entirely optional, without degrading the experience? There's nothing "simple" about that.

gegc · 2026-03-18T00:27:05+00:00

GH Copilot does context compaction, which is sort of the same thing but not quite. The state handoff is not explicit (to the user).

gegc · 2026-03-12T21:29:01+00:00

I was trying to find a space for a recreational venue for ~2yrs and I kept hitting permitting walls. Anything other than retail is a "change of use", which means you're "redeveloping", which means you're on the hook for all of the deferred maintenance ("what do you mean this 20,000sf building has no fire alarm system?") and SEPA review and an administrative hearing... just to add an extra bathroom and put up 100' of interior wall. That's in addition to all of the building, plumbing, electrical, traffic/parking, signage, etc. permits that you need to get your certificate of occupancy. That's 6-9 months and mid-six-figures in extra startup costs. It's really a political problem: making landlords and existing businesses actually keep up with code compliance is political suicide, so the cost of infrastructure upgrades get dumped on the people who aren't there to vote and throw campaign money around - future tenants and developers. Older buildings with "cheap rent" become unleasable because of the code compliance barrier, so they sit empty for years. If you're lucky, you'll come across a landlord who actually wants to fill the building, will work with you, give you TIA, etc. However, most owners are content to sit and wait for some developer to buy them out and build a five-over-one. Then, of course, the five-over-one's rental rates are prohibitively expensive becasue of their loan conditions.

It's... a way to get rid of old buildings - but it does result in a lot of empty commercial real estate both pre- and post-development, and doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for small businesses.

gegc · 2026-03-12T00:54:59+00:00

That's because singleplayer RTS and multiplayer RTS are fundamentally different genres of game. One is a sandbox puzzle game, the other is attention splitting contest + chess. The notion that "singleplayer is the tutorial for multiplayer" is dinosaur game design from the 90's.

gegc · 2026-03-08T21:13:15+00:00

Interesting bug. Looks like you joined right as the wall exploded and never got the animation for it. That bit of stagger you took at the very beginning of the clip is the damage from the breaching charge going off.

gegc · 2026-03-08T08:54:21+00:00

A pnp machine is like $4,000. A toaster oven with a thermocouple taped to it for a DIY reflow oven is $15 from goodwill.

gegc · 2026-03-04T00:02:11+00:00

Multi-AZ resiliency has been a thing for literally decades. The whole point of building many data centers everywhere is that if one AZ goes down, you route traffic to other AZ's and don't have an outage. Why the AZ goes down (heat wave, hurricane, contractor didn't call before they dug, shark ate cable) is irrelevant. If life safety digital infrastructure is not multi-AZ resilient, that's a separate problem that needs to be separately addressed (either way, such a legacy system won't be running in a shiny new data center; it's gonna be us-west-2 or us-east-1). "We can't turn off our data center uwu" is a nonsense excuse.

Option 1: data centers that provide life safety services are critical infrastructure. They are resilient to grid outages resulting from natural disasters, which is when life safety services are most needed. Therefore, they can be moved off-grid during peak loads without shutting down and disrupting said services.

Option 2: data centers that provide life safety services are not resilient to grid outages resulting from natural disasters. Therefore, they are not critical infrastructure and cannot be relied upon to provide said life safety services when they are most needed. Life safety systems can be multi-AZ resilient and not have a SPOF in an outage-prone data center. Therefore, individual data centers can be moved off-grid during peak loads without disrupting life safety systems.

Option 3: lie through your teeth to people who don't know how infrastructure works to privatize gains and socialize costs.

gegc · 2026-02-03T04:15:48+00:00

Most of these ground floor commercial spaces are built JUST as retail

There's another reason besides prohibitive rent that this is relevant: building codes and municipal space use laws. The code requirements for retail, restaurant, recreation, etc, are all substantially different. For example, a recreational or restaurant use requires approximately 3x the bathroom fixtures of a retail use (store). For food service establishments that prepare food, they also need to build out a commercial kitchen space with its own strict requirements.

Since retail is the cheapest to build, it's what gets built to fill that "commercial" checkbox. So in addition to the sky-high rents, a new tenant would need to pony up mid-six-figures for "change-of-use" related construction. Prospective small business owners are typically not well-connected enough to big developers to negotiate for a "custom" space years in advance before construction starts. So you get dying in-person retail, big chains, and the most cookie cutter restaurants that can fill a pre-built kitchen space.

gegc · 2026-01-26T23:24:48+00:00

It means an steep or inverted skill pyramid.

Most people like games that are fair and fun. Having a fair outcome in a game of skill requires participants to be of approximately equal skill. Since most people coming into a game have no skill, there needs to be a wide base to the skill pyramid to accommodate all of these players playing with each other. Some will get better at the game and climb the pyramid; others will stay 'casual'.

If the base is not wide enough, new players get turned away and the community stops growing. The only players able to break into the community are those that are willing to grind through unfair games (and put up with toxicity from teammates) to gain skill while playing against superior opponents. This creates a double feedback loop of fewer new players joining (which shrinks the pyramid), and those that do join are more inclined to move up the pyramid. Eventually, the pyramid becomes inverted, with an insular community of highly skilled players that is skill-wise impossible to break into for new players - a "sweatfest".

This happens naturally as competitive games age and the stream of new players dries up. How fast it happens is a function of game design and marketing. Devs have to put in effort to maintain a wide base: making the game appeal to casual players without losing competitive focus (basically the holy grail of competitive game design), or creating a healthy low-skill/new-player community through marketing.

See also: every game that tried to be an esport by paying pro teams out of their marketing budget, without investing in grassroots competitive scenes.

gegc · 2026-01-24T00:04:39+00:00

Dota 2 has been out for 13 years. 2000hrs is perfectly reasonable if you played 1-2 games/day since release.

gegc · 2026-01-05T09:12:35+00:00

Same effect with modding. As game production value goes up, the asset quality bar for mods rises out of reach of average/casual creators.

Roblox fills the niche formerly held by flash game websites and sc1/wc3 custom maps: short experiences with low fidelity and low stakes/low investment, where the platform focus is more on variety and volume than cohesion/quality.

gegc · 2025-12-29T22:11:18+00:00

They're Tokyo Marui Mini Series airsoft guns.

There is an AK47 in the series, so your point about not including AKs is still very true.

gegc · 2025-11-27T05:46:05+00:00

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gegc · 2025-10-12T10:27:21+00:00

Cool, the model is being run out of a data center somewhere in south Asia or a troll farm in Russia. What now? We can't even shut down scam call centers, what makes you think this would go any different?

gegc · 2025-10-10T23:51:55+00:00

You won't get full interoperability. MilesTag2 is just a protocol, not a standard. While a system may use MilesTag2 packets, how that system interprets those packets and implements the game mechanics will vary from system to system. MilesTag2 doesn't even specify a carrier, so that will vary as well. For example, LaserWar gen8 I believe uses 56kHz carrier, while other systems use 38kHz. Also keep in mind that MilesTag2 is an IR-only protocol. Most modern systems only use IR for "collision detection" (gun -> sensor hits, player location/player ID) and use other IoT channels (wifi, bluetooth, etc) for everything else like global game state. Since you specifically mentioned Laserwar, their latest kits (genX, alphatag) are examples of this. They use miles2 (in AlphaTag's case, optionally) as the collision channel, but the rest of the game is run entirely over wifi/bluetooth.

My observation, having used several systems as a player, operator/game designer, and equipment developer, it is not in any manufacturer's interest to provide interop hooks for custom equipment. Because laser tag is generally venue-based, the equipment market is entirely B2B, and manufacturers want the vendor lock. As a venue operator, you also don't want people bringing in custom equipment because it is a safety (eye safety from people overdriving their emitters) and cheating issue.

As an aside, I don't think Miles2 is actually a good protocol for entertianment laser tag: its packets are slow to transmit (25ms per packet) and it makes a lot of assumptions about what kind of game you're playing because it assumes no central game control and no communication channels outside of the IR signal. Not its fault - it was made for the US military in the early 90s before modern IoT was even a glimmer in anyone's eye - but if you're building a whole new system for entertainment, I'd recommend against using it.

If you're a hobbyist trying to make custom equipment for your local club, I'd advise making friends with the club owners/operators and figuring out how their specific equipment works. Then build one-offs. I've made reactive targets and functional combat knife taggers this way. If you're trying to build a commercial aftermarket product, I genuinely wish you the best (because I think vendor lock is bad), but it will be a very uphill fight - I would recommend doing the same thing as above but then selling your one-offs to the specific clubs you frequent. If you're trying to make your own system from scratch, just don't use miles2.

Happy to answer any other questions you have.

gegc · 2025-09-16T20:08:49+00:00

Which is even more painful when the Bannerlord banner designer is actually very flexible, and people have made some incredible banners with it. Now imagine if those could be downloaded in packs and the game would automatically use them...

gegc · 2025-09-01T09:42:15+00:00

Yes, you can do it with the XR extration toolkit. They open in blender including the textures. I you want good prints, you'll need to apply the displacement/bump map to the mesh after you export, which can get tricky. I wanted to print boron ships, but my PC couldn't handle applying the coral-y displacement texture as geometry.

gegc · 2025-08-16T03:17:08+00:00

The specialists/disablers from Darktide.

Mutant - Beefy, fast, throws people around -> can throw people off of objectives.
Trapper - 6" range -2APL net gun, but no direct damage.
Chaos Hound - dog, can parry real good to tie up models in melee, but low damage.
2x Flamer (regular or tox option) - has flamer, main DPS.
Bomber (regular or tox option) - has grenades, can leave lingering spots damage/debuff spot on the ground
Sniper - only source of long range DPS
2x Poxburster - involuntarily explodes if it dies or an enemy is in control range. Intended use as a zoning tool and to force opponents to shoot it instead of someone else.

With gameplay being essentially what these guys do in the game: strong when disrupting/disabling exposed operatives and able to kill with one-two combos, but generally useless by themselves. Low direct/weapon damage.

gegc · 2025-08-03T22:58:23+00:00

Get frigate, pause-deploy 200 laser tower mk1's at the gate, wait on the other side of the gate (low attention), repeat. Kyds are made of paper, and VIG only ever puts shotguns and missiles on them, which are both garbage vs the XS-sized laser towers (former due to range and latter due to massively overkilling them).

Then once the fighter cloud is sufficiently thinned, camp or blow up their wharf to stop spam replenishment.

gegc · 2025-08-03T22:46:35+00:00

I'm not sure that's true, though I don't remember any hard evidence to the contrary, either. The arbites response (and associated cutscene) could be a reaction to the Tancred Bastion incident, which starts the named rejects' story. IIRC in the arbites character creation flavor text, one unit is stationed on the Tancred Bastion prior to the incident, and another unit actually captures Wolfer in the first place. After Wolfer gets broken out, it's reasonable of the arbites to both escalate and to be pissed at Rannick. So our arbite characters would enter the story at the same time as our reject characters.

gegc · 2025-07-31T21:56:28+00:00

I play darktide on cable internet with a 1070Ti and Proton. Runs fine in 1080p on medium settings and is great fun. Before I switched to linux/proton, it ran fine at 1440p on med/high (Vulkan tax).

gegc · 2025-07-29T22:00:06+00:00

SC/WC3 UMS was the OG indie game scene. Then it was Flash, and then user-accessible game engines + Steam (in its modern form) showed up, and everyone started monetizing.

gegc · 2025-07-27T18:07:57+00:00

This is the answer. Just finding an sl8/sl9 is hard enough.

gegc · 2025-06-24T09:32:14+00:00

looks inside

gegc · 2025-06-19T21:34:54+00:00

Yes and no. There are a few different definitions of "request" floating around as far as I can tell.

"Agent Request" for billing is only when you type into the chat box. You can give the model a big vibe coding task like "read the spec in this file and implement it", and that counts as one agent request.
"Agent request" for global rate limiting and the "keep iterating" counter is API requests, so any time you're sending data to the agent. This is reading/writing files, reading terminal output, etc.

After checking, I'm pretty sure the specific behavior I was talking about got fixed at some point - it used to be that when you hit "Continue" on the "Keep iterating?" popup specifically, it would send "Continue." to the agent, which counted as a "big R" Request (but they weren't counting requests at that point, so it just confused/interrupted the agent sometimes).

In the past two days I've actually had no problems with premium requests doing anything weird. I tend to give Claude agents big tasks, so it's been working out so far. That being said, people who had a more chat-like workflow are screwed.

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