(This isn’t about co-op with 4 friends games like PEAK or RV There Yet, Borderlands or Magicka)

Stage 1 - purely individualistic games

In many games - COD comes to mind - you can just bust into a room and solo everyone. That’s individualistic gameplay, where other players are merely pedestrians in a saga where you are the main character.

Stage 2 - shallow teamwork

Then there’s games that have " teamwork " that boils down to pressing E to heal or revive someone - Battlefield or the tank/healer duo in MMOs. The only reason you’re interacting with another player is because there is no alternative. If an ammo guy doesn’t drop the ammo box for you - you run out of bullets, can’t shoot and die as a result.

Left 4 Dead, Borderlands, Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers (?) come to mind. The teamwork happens in a sterile game loop.

Stage 3 - deep teamwork

Then there are games where you technically can go at it alone, but due to the way the game is structured it’s perhaps not the wisest choice. I notice that those games have a little more natural voice chat usage than in the current quiet zeitgeist. Also your opponents might be a pre-organized group of friends more often, since it’s easier to coordinate playing than with randoms.

Examples of deep teamwork games

Rematch

Rematch is an online football (the European one) game. Instead of the usual FIFA-style bird’s eye view, you control just a single player on the field from a third person perspective. It’s also much more arcade-y. It has 1v1, 3v3 and 5v5 matches.

In this game yeah you could theoretically try to dribble past every defender like a main character prime Messi, but this is the exact type of person people complain about on the game’s forums - “WHY DON’T THEY JUST PASS THE BALL”. When I pass the ball, I think how do I pass it so it’s most comfortable for the receiver - how long do I hold the pass button to get it just right? Pretty rarely people will actually use the built-in voice chat feature and it’s pretty satisfying (when they’re not thrash talking) since you’re actually working with another human.

Holdfast (ship mode)

This is like Sea of Thieves but the round takes like 20 minutes. Two factions’ ships spawn on a map. A bunch of randoms form a team each ship. There’s a captain, gunners and repairmen. People larp and use voice chat a lot.

In the normal game mode some clans do the whole napoleonic wars thing and form up lines to shoot muskets. There’s an Officer role that can point where a line should form and people standing inside that “line blueprint” laid down by them get a boost to fire rate as an incentive to work together.

Foxhole

Foxhole is a 3D isometric(?) third person perspective shooter. There’s a persistent war between two factions that normally lasts ~20 real life days. When you spawn, you can equip rifles, ammo, uniforms but also materials to repair and construct bases etc. All of those items are made by players. There’s a player that gathers the resources, then the same person could refine them into actual e.g. rifles, and then there’s another player who will take the rifle crates from the backlines to the frontline base. It’s a bit like EVE Online due to the player-based economy and persistence, just that Foxhole wars actually end.

This game has the absolute highest percentage of players using voice chat I’ve seen in a game. Foxhole’s intro screen you see on every launch tells you “you are a cog in a machine”. It’s deliberately janky and set up so you can’t be individualistic:

• medics can’t heal themselves - either find another medic or voice chat to a player, tell him you’ll drop your medkit and if he can heal you
• if you’re bleeding you can patch yourself up, but it’s 10x less resource efficient than if another medic does it to you
• some demolition items come in two parts - the explosive and the detonator. You need to have another player who will help you carry the other one
• artillery requires a gunner, a loader and sometimes a spotter. A gunner can go at it alone but it’s annoyingly slow
• veteran players often stand at spawn and rally other (random) players to join them. This is often a “sticky rush” where a blob of players grabs a few anti tank granades and sprints at a tank to kill it (yes you die, but a tank is much more valuable than your worthless life). It’s possible to do a solo sticky rush, but it’s rarely effective

There’s lots of big clans, but it’s OK to play solo. The devs also have a similar game - Anvil Empires - set in a medieval setting. This is an “MMOFPS” like Planetside 2. There aren’t many of those because shooters require good latency, and the “massive” part of “MMO” works agains that.

Summary

Any other games like this? I fear that those games are “one of a kind”, because there’s no real alternative to Foxhole or Rematch.
In today’s individualistic world, what other games are there?

• Space Station 13 fits the bill pretty well, despite no voice chat. Barotrauma is similar, maybe
• I guess someone will recommend the milsim shooters like Squad, Squad 44, Arma (Reforger) though I fear it’s not as deep or organic (i.e. you need to be in a clan).
• MOBAs like Dota 2 can come to mind but I feel it lacks depth in that aspect - the teamwork is diluted down to the skills your hero has.
• “Over The Top WWI” has a nice trench engineering aspect but I refunded it because the godmode Battlefront-style call-ins were too annoying (and individualistic to the “god”), plus you die too fast to make a friend.
• There’s a game called Eco, it’s similar to Minecraft but each player has a profession and I think the players “need eachother” to fulfil each other’s needs
• Planetside 2 was great back in the day but it’s too COD-like - why have a medic if you can just self-heal all the time?
• Star Wars Galaxies also seemed like it used to have a real player economy - it’s still alive on private servers but feels dated.
• I like how Arc Raiders has a social component (the “don’t shoot”). Rust and Sub Rosa similarly. But it’s not really it.