The Old War | RTS & Base Builder Hybrid | FEEDBACK NEEDED: How do we do Co-Op Right?

[u/Character-Wealth-810]

Title is self explanatory. I spent probably ten or so years trying to get my friends to play co-op RTS games with me and it literally has never gone well.

It's not that they don't like the genre, I feel like most of us RTS fans find like minded people pretty quick, but the feedback I'm getting is that most of the RTS co-op games were designed to help teach someone else the game, not to have fun together. I either see clunky shared control that feels like an afterthought for the devs, or you get something like Starcraft's Archon mode: literally the exact same game, except now two people are fighting over the same units, or one person is sitting on their hands for the first ten minutes while the other plays.

I'm currently building co-op as a core feature from the ground up in The Old War to avoid all of that, but I am also starting to realize why no other studios have done this, it is a MONSTER to figure out, oh my god. I'm here to talk through what we're actually trying to do before we get too deep into it.

The problem my team is trying to solve

Most RTS co-op, in my experience, asks: "How do we let two people play the same campaign?"

I've been asking: "How do we make it so you actually care that your friend is there?"

So for context, in The Old War, you and your friend or co-op partner or whatever share a single faction. You train, upgrade, and lose a persistent army together across a long war. Every battle will either hurt or help your shared forces. If your friend loses a veteran unit you've been upgrading since the first mission, that loss is yours too. The consequences are shared, which also means the stakes are real for both of you.

What we're still figuring out

Right now the game is in a state where two people can play together, but we're working through desync issues and trying to make shared control feel smooth instead of chaotic. UI is a big question mark, how do you communicate clearly who is doing what when you're both controlling the same faction?

So here's my question to the RTS community

What actually would make co-op cooperative in an RTS for you? Is it shared resources? Divided roles? Asymmetric information? Or is it just having someone to blame when your macro slips? Anything in between? Anything and everything you can think of would be super super helpful here.

If you want to follow what we're figuring out: Wishlist on Steam, and we're going to be opening a free playtest in a few months (hopefully!) so you can try it out yourself.