Time to put our differences aside and work together.
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.
