So the game was obviously made for solo-play from my experience, though the free co-op weekend did convince 2/4 of my game night guys to buy the game including me.
Major problems are the environments were clearly designed for one player and a certain number of enemies, but when you start adding allies and additional enemies it gets cramped, then that gets exacerbated by the friendly fire. I’m not against the FF in principle since it could make for a fun co-op experience raging at your teammates (lol), but the environments are not suitable to it. It’s difficult for a ranged player to take side angles to shoot around melee allies in maps this tight with this many choke points etc. - the quick fix is to remove FF, the hard fix is to redesign environments AT LEAST within the crucible.
Adding more bodies also creates another problem: camera chaos. It’s easy to get lost in a pile of enemies and teammates, especially with many of the over the top visual FX in the game. One thing that I think should be baseline here is an option to add player outlines, at least for your own character (customizable colored glow outline maybe, or just a white default) - with optional ones for your teammates as well (separate color preferably from the player). This way if you get trapped in a corner on the far side of the screen with a stack of enemies between your camera and your body, you at least can see yourself through the outline to time i-frames etc, and attempt to fight back or maneuver out without having to simply spam dodges to try and get back into camera sights. I want to battle enemies, not the camera.
While the crucible is cool and I can’t wait to see additional bosses and rooms added, this game’s co-op due to the very strong combat would REALLY benefit from dungeons. Something akin to the ones in the ESO MMO, or like what the newer game Fellowship is trying to do (WoW mythic+ ripoff). You guys are already good at designing enemies, jumping puzzles, bosses, etc. this would be a very fun expansion to co-op content. I don’t know if there’s “room” in the gameplay loop for crucible and dungeons, unless they each provide a unique strength in terms of types of loot priority - but I can see big potential value here.
PvP is the obvious other way to add co-op and other multiplayer value, but from what I understand it’s already in the works. I will say, PvP is a waste of time until optimization is pretty good. I’m a huge arena junkie from the WoW days, but games like elden ring (weighty combat, plus a backend not really “made” for online play) really struggle to have meaningful PvP. My suggestion for this game would be the same I had for D4: small-scale battlegrounds. Teams of 4-12 players max, cool little castle siege (attack/defend) gametypes, you can even pilot it with a single map if it’s designed well. There’s a particular map from Guild Wars 1 that comes to mind, where the attackers land on a beach and can either try to prop up ladders or ram the front gate, or go around back and fire a trebuchet at the postern door. I think it would also be cool to have a third option where there’s a metal grate that you try to attack with picks and bombs or something in an attempt to come up underneath, then the defenders simply try to defend the keep and maybe a boss or a loot-room.
If you go the Lost-Ark route with very simplistic team combat instead of objective based gameplay (arenas) just make sure to do really solid map design. Big open spaces with no line of sight favor ranged too heavily. A little bit of intelligent Z-axis and LoS design goes a long way.
Great game so far however, big potential.