diary of an indie game developer

 
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Why is Castle Crashers Fun? (And is it the first console online co-op success?)

castle-crashers.jpgFrom the essential “Theory of Fun” approach, CC’s combat gives your brain plenty to munch on.  In short: there’s absolutely no way a game like Double Dragon or Golden Axe would do well with today’s gamers.  Castle Crashers has developed a far deeper combat system, that puts it closer perhaps to Devil May Cry (especially in being juggle-centric) than the older titles that ostensibly inspired it.

Of course, a major draw of Castle Crashers is the co-op play.  I don’t even know if I would have purchased CC without online co-op.  I can’t think of a single other time that’s been true: co-op is often treated as an early, easy feature cut, and for good reason.  Does that equation change for XBLA titles?  You know your players are online.  But plenty of other titles have assumed their players are online– it’s just usually used for competitive play.  (In my post title, I have a bit of fun with qualifiers.  MMOs are co-op successes.  Golden Axe was a co-op success.  Still, I find Castle Crashers to be a surprising outlier, given today’s console game environment.)

On a side note, while everyone accepts that people enjoy playing games together, I haven’t heard an analysis of this to nearly the extent that Theory of Fun tackles mechanics.  This is probably well-trodden territory by psychologists, but how many developers read psych journals?  It sounds like the “massively solo” success of WoW caught even its creators by surprise.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:24 am and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • geoff

    I remember first seeing Castle Crashers and playing that first level with you and 2 randoms at PAX 2006. Even at that early stage, I got really excited about the prospect of online brawler co-ops. A lot of that was nostalgia – back in the arcade days, I dumped a lot of quarters into Double Dragon, Golden Axe, Gauntlet – but even more into later brawlers like TMNT, The Simpsons and the 6-player X-Men game. But the other part was the fun art style and (even then) reasonably sophisticated combat.

    I personally would applaud more XBLA titles that design around co-op play. I discovered some time ago that I would really rather team up with friends than anything else for online play – whether we were playing other people or an AI, it was more fun to do so with some buddies (or, more specifically, much less fun with 14 year olds calling you names because your ‘toss build order isn’t exactly what he wants it to be)

  • http://www.easilystartled.com/ JM

    I have actually read some studies on the added “stimulus” that playing with or against real people provides. In one example, participants are playing a very simple tag-type game by controlling blocks on a video game screen. All subjects are hooked up to BP and heart rate monitors. Half are then told they are playing against a subject in the adjacent room, the other half are told they are playing against an AI.

    In reality, all are playing vs. the same AI, but those who think they are playing against a living person become far more physically excited during the game play (BP & HR go up). Just knowing (even if wrong) that there is another human involved, at least on a physiological level, seems to increase the level of involvement. Maybe this translates into fun?