For someone who plays a lot of co-op shooters, you’d think that my friends and I would be pretty decent at working together as a team to complete an objective, but alas, that is simply not the case. The problem is that there’s just too much leeway in most co-op shooters for players to go off and do their own thing, abandoning their friends in the process. I need restrictions if I’m to be a good, selfless teamplayer, which is where Rogue Point comes in.
I got to check out this upcoming co-op FPS roguelike at Gamescom. It’s made by the same devs (Crowbar Collective) who managed to pull off the Half-Life remake Black Mesa, so my hopes were high from the start. The vision for Rogue Point is simple: make a co-op shooter that actually requires players to be cooperative—groundbreaking, I know.
“We want to create a four-player co-op shooter that you can use to hang out with and play with your buddies, and also challenges you to work together too,” Adam Engels, founder of Crowbar Collective, told me at Gamescom. “If you want it to be a casual hangout, you can do that. But if you want to really grind it, try and get everything out of the game, you can do that too.”
Rogue Point is a roguelike four-player FPS in which you get a string of missions to complete, with different enemies, maps, and guns that you can purchase with money earned in prior missions, similar to how Counter-Strike’s economy functions. You and your team complete missions to finish the campaign. Once you get to the end, everything resets. Some perks do remain as the devs “want to have players rewarded for going through the loop”, but all your money disappears so you can go at it again fresh.
“[Rogue Point] is constantly changing, and whatever decisions you’re making in the game have risk-reward—the co-op aspect plays into that,” Brad Sheremeta, marketing and community manager, followed on.
As for the individual missions, these vary from having to kill enemies like grunts, berserkers armed with machetes, or snipers, to having to secure an objective and then get to the extraction point and get out. The maps are all based in the same four locations (albeit in different areas): a mall, an office, an oil rig, and an airport. But before you can jump into these, you need to complete a planning phase.
Players can decide how in-depth they want to be during this phase, with everyone having the ability to draw on the same map in real-time and work out strategies and identify areas of interest before heading into the mission.
Everywhere we could find to reward players for playing co-op, we did that.
Adam Engels, founder of Crowbar Collective.
“You can draw on this map,” Engels says. “Somebody could plan to go left, and a team could plan to go right. And now you’re doing a two-and-two buddy system. We also have an Intel system where you can earn Intel Points. So if I want to know where the medical stations are on the map, I can spend that currency in-game to display where it is on the planner.”
As the planner of the group, I absolutely love this. Too often do my friends and I dive into a mission with no clue as to what’s going on, which almost always ends with everyone splitting up and getting picked off one by one. And like with most FPS games, dying isn’t the preferred outcome in Rogue Point.
Your team will only fail out of a campaign if everyone dies, and even then, you get a handful of lives so you can choose to retry a mission instead of going back to square one. But if just one person dies in a mission, “they will lose their gear, but can come back for the next mission,” Engels explains. Having limited cash and no gear will make the following missions tricky, but that’s where dead drops can come in.
“We have a dead drop system so that if I want to in-game gamble with my in-game currency—we want to be super clear about that—I can do that and roll through and see what I get,” Engels says. “So I got a CBM and a smoke grenade. I can share inventory so that, if I’m with my buddies, say I don’t really need this CBM for whatever reason, I can share it.”
“If I don’t do that well, and Adam does great, and he has all the money, he’s gonna have to loan me a gun,” Sheremeta adds. “Hopefully, the dead drop system will come in handy if you’re not doing that well, and you only have, say, $500, and you do a dead drop roll, and you come out with a good gun. Hopefully, that’ll get you through the mission that you’re having a tough time with.”
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To help players try to avoid any needless deaths, Rogue Point does have quite a few revive kits scattered around each map: “You can find them in the world, or you can buy them for not a ton of money,” Engels says. “There are three charges on the ones you pull off the wall, so you could potentially revive all your buddies.”
There are also more rewards for players who look after their teammates: “Team healing is much faster than if I were to do it on myself, and it gives them more heals,” Engels explains. You’ll also get more cash if you use healing items on teammates. “Everywhere we could find to reward players for playing co-op, we did that. “
It seems redundant to stress just how much teamwork goes into completing a mission in Rogue Point because every co-op shooter should have this level of cooperation baked into it, but that just isn’t always the case, although it should be. Adding perks for helping teammates, an interactive planning phase, collaborative economy and dead drops, and even just the ability to reach into your teammates backpack to get something you need ensures that playing Rogue Point feels like a proper group experience. One that encourages some good-natured fun to be had with friends.
“Adam always tells us, ‘Just make a game that you can play with your friends’,” Sheremeta says. “We just want people to be able to relax and play games together. It’s a fulfilling need for people—we’re just having a good time.”
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