The State of Couch Coop

We've been playing in couch coop since day one, having more than 1000 hours playtime under our belt, several characters in endgame, pinnacle bosses done, arbiter of ash not yet, but tried.

We also do have roughly the same amount of couch coop playtime in Diable 4 and 3, each. So yes, we do can compare.

And truth to be told, this game is fun in couch coop. Until the end of act 3.

1. Playing with characters in different campaign states in act 4 is a pain in the...

While all is fine as long as two characters with the same progress are played, trying to level a new character accompanied by one already having finished the campaign becomes jumping through hoops and over sticks, just to be able to activate or finish some quests. Means: Constant relogging to one char, doing the thing, then back in with the second char. Using the new char as player one does help to mitigate some of this problems, yet still not all. And quite frankly, you might not see a problem, but on couch coop it means constantly switching sides. And I don't know how often we did die just because we had looked at the wrong health bubble or waited for the charges on the wrong side.

While mainly act 4 is a problem in this regard, activation difficulties are sprinkled all over your game (for instance sacrificing the heart in act 3).


And yes, we *do* have to regulary level new chars, because

2. The balancing between chars and their mechanics in the end game in couch coop is plain bad.

You see, we are glued together. In real life by choice, in couch coop by design. And that is a problem when having characters that are using any sort of mechanic that goes beyond skill 1 + skill 2 = power.

Even more so, at some point there *will* be a discrepancy in power level. So while one of us is deleting the screen, the other one is running behind, essentially just picking up loot. For hours.

And yes, we are aware that this power discrepancy is unavoidable. It's the same in D4 at some point. But the results of this would be not. If you decide to have a stern look at your system.

So far any mechanic that uses crit (CoC), on kill or even cast on elemental ailment is more or less a solo affaire. Simply because most of the time there are no mobs to activate these effects. Not because there aren't enough mobs. But because they are gone in an instant.

And yes, you might think "why don't you just do harder maps?!". Well, you can only have this notion if you never tried. Because first of, maps do have a limit to where they can be pushed. Second, this doesn't help, because your defense would have to increase for that as well. And you do have to juggle with these numbers for two chars.

So most of the time we do end up frustrated in tier 15 maps, not being able to push further, one of us killing the mobs, the other one just picking flowers and loot. Maybe having some shining seconds in helping to defeat the boss.

And because we are, as stated before, glued together, we also can't just get our own mobs.



We are aware that the couch coop crowd is quite a small one and thus doesn't rake in so much money. But we still buy supporter packs. Yet ;)

So it would be really nice if you give this whole mess at least something more than just an after thought.

I don't couch coop a lot but having split screen is always has been an industry best practice or at least a dynamic screen when you are close together or faraway.

Aside from handful of Mario games that works on one screen, I think an ARPG would actually be better if it was split screen. D3 kinda had this problem too but it's easily solved by doing T16 and higher paragons.

Couch co-op players really do end up playing a completely different ARPG than solo players. In games like Diablo 3, Diablo 4, and now (for us) Path of Exile 2, it slowly turns into this weird meta-game of “which two builds are actually compatible with each other for 200(0)+ hours.”

Too much CC and the screen becomes unreadable. Too much AoE and one person deletes everything before the other build even starts functioning. One ranged and one melee build sounds good on paper until the camera and pacing starts fighting you. Double generator builds can feel terrible, but pairing a setup build with a giga-clear build also feels bad because one player becomes the sidekick.

So instead of “play whatever fantasy you like,” couch co-op becomes a hunt for:

* same combat range
* similar clear speed
* compatible pacing
* readable visuals
* similar survivability
* not too many overlapping effects
* and preferably both builds should actually get to play the game

It’s kinda funny game-design territory because almost nobody talks about it outside the tiny couch co-op crowd. Balance discussions online are usually pure solo efficiency.

But we still logged thousands of hours anyway and it says a lot about how fun shared-screen ARPGs can be when they do click. THERE ARE DOZENS OF US. DOZENS,

I just switched from Xbox co-op to steam co-op on a custom bazzite PC.

We are still using our controllers and everything works just the same except the new system is way faster and doesn't bog down due to graphics.

The last update that allowed co-op players to both access vendors at the same time was a great quality of life improvement.

Although we have gotten used to sharing an account, our biggest desire is still to allow login with different accounts for co-op so that you can have separate character lists and inventory.

I like to keep my inventory light and my wife chooses to save everything and organize everything each week.

Yes, there are some oddities playing through together in act 3 mainly, but we can live with those issues.

I would imagine that the thing that we want most is probably fairly difficult to implement especially as regards steam but everything else has been great lately.