Co-Pilot Mode - Better Together - Extra Credits

buried in a recent Xbox One update little heralded and with little Fanfare Microsoft rolled out a new way to play games with those you care about most let's talk about co-pilot mode also special thanks to gem for stepping in as our artist [Music] today this episode is brought to you by crunchy roll sign up at crunchy roll.com extra or click the link in the description to get crunchy roll ad free for 30 days the idea behind co-pilot mode is simple it lets you remap A Game's controls across two different game pads this may not seem like a big deal but it solves so many problems for designers it gives so many more options to players and it comes at so little development cost that I cannot believe that no platform holder has done this before first let's talk about what this does for sharing games with kids or parents or people who might not be as good at games as you are James for one is super excited to play something like

enter the gungeon with his littlest nephew in that game there are these screen clearing bombs called blanks that you can set off when things get too hectic how great would it be to map the blanks to a young niece or nephew's controller so you can play together how fun would it be to shout bomb when everything gets crazy and how excited will they be to press the button and watch everything blow up around your character now will you play better with their help no chance you would almost certainly Faire better if they just sat and watched but this is such a great great and meaningful way to play together that simply was not possible before that is an amazing thing especially because the game's developers didn't have to put any resources into it by simply offering this feature as an option Microsoft has given James as a player the opportunity to design into his games an experience that he can play with the people he loves and the game devs didn't have to sacrifice any part of the core game experience to accommodate it and throughout my life I have had plenty of people that I wanted to share this media with but they were

new to games even if they were willing to sit alongside me and just watch as I played they still missed something key to this medium the interactivity and being able to give them just a small taste of that would go a long way to explaining why this medium is so compelling but there are other problems this solves too our industry has a huge problem with accessibility most of our games are made for people with a full range of movement in their hands and very often even when the developers want to make their games accessible to people who don't have that Advantage it's a problem of resources I mean we've had to face this question ourselves do you spend your resources making your game 3% better for 97% of your audience or do you make it 50% better for 3% of your audience that's a tough call and when money is involved the decision almost always comes down on the side of the broader audience and while co-pilot mode definitely doesn't completely solve that problem it does give players much more control over how they approach our game

over the course of working in the industry and making extra credit we have met so many people who have come up with the most ingenious ways to play their games out of necessity finding ways to play them with their chin or their feet because most games just weren't made to be accessible for them having the ability to spread out A Game's controls across two gamepads and having the ability to place both controllers where it's most convenient will do so much to help make our games more accessible to these players and the best part is that Microsoft doing this at the platform level makes every game on their console become more accessible heck even the ability to Simply scroll through a Netflix menu on the console might be made easier so not only does this allow many more people to enjoy games but allows more people to use the platform in general that's not just better for everybody it also makes good business sense for that reason alone I'm shocked we haven't done this before but there's one other great thing that this feature adds and that is the ability for all of us to invent the craziest code Co-op

experiences we can dream up I mean we've talked before about how couch Co-op is often a pretty hard feature to justify focusing on in the modern game development environment and co-op mode may not be able to replace that but still imagine how much of a riot this could be with friends you think driving around in GTA is ridiculous now try doing it with two people in control imagine the Bonkers Dark Souls challenge runs people are going to dream up with the ability to map buttons across multiple controllers there is a huge pile of these weird interesting game variants that we as players can come up with now will these novelty modes be something that we want to play all the time no but will they be a lark for a few hours heck yeah they will and really when it comes to couch Co-op isn't that what we're looking for most of the time what's more this could spawn all sorts of ridiculous interesting or just plain impressive Let's Plays for us to watch as people come up with all new challenges for the games that they thought they had mastered who knows we might even find a whole new form of

Charity competition event Springs up around this feature now time will tell whether or not co-op mode lives up to its potential but the Simplicity and elegance of this idea gives me great hope it really does shock me that something this cheap to implement hasn't been tried before it answers so many of the major design problems that we're trying to solve in today's industry issues of family play accessibility and couch Co-op and IT addresses them not in a one-off single game solution sort of way but rather at least to some degree for every game on the platform I would not be surprised if the other platform holders follow suit cuz this seems to be a very low effort fix for the kind of returns it provides and if that happens it presents the Intriguing question of what this is going to mean for design as a designer James would love to have an easy way to throw a simple even if imperfect family mode and zany co-op mode into his single player games just by putting in a new button mapping I mean just think about what even having a family mode as a menu option would mean

for how many people play I cannot wait to see what sort of creative forms of Co-op y'all come up with out there see you next week this episode was brought to you by crunchy roll your source for just so much anime I have a long list of anime that I've been meaning to dig into like mob psycho 100 konosuba urion ice Hau Moka Maga Samurai CHL rezero jeez this is going to take me forever fortunately crunchy roll has all of those and tons of other series all professionally subtitled and streaming in 1080p HD so if you want to just bask in a sea of anime or if you just want to get that one anime nerd friend off of your back shut up Jeff I'm getting to it then click the link down in the description or sign up at crunchyroll.com extra to get Crunchyroll add free for 30 days that's crunchyroll.com [Music]

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