Valve, surely you didn't mean this?

Today, on the Steam newfeed, a very interesting piece of information was posted. I'll re-post the article, and then my own thoughts on it.
Here goes:


"The makers of such acclaimed single-player video games as Portal and Half-Life 2 want all of their future games to support connected, non-solo gaming, in some way, at all levels.


That assertion first appeared in the Final Hours of Portal 2, journalist Geoff Keighley's recent behind-the-scenes chronicle about Valve's newest game. It's an assertion he told me he heard directly from Valve founder Gabe Newell and the company's project manager Erik Johnson.


"Portal 2 will probably be Valve's last game with an isolated single-player experience," Keighley wrote in Final Hours, "What this all means is something Newell is still trying to figure out."
Keighley told me that he considered the comment "curious," noting that the quality of the solo-only main campaign of Portal 2 was a fantastic piece of work. (I've checked with Valve on this, but they didn't reply by press time.) The signs that solo-only modes are on their way are there, not just from within Valve but all around the pioneering games company.


Valve's Portal 2 introduced multiplayer to the Portal games through a two-player co-op mode. The company's recent 2008 and 2009 Left4Dead games were presented as a primarily-multiplayer experience, even on consoles where such an animal is about as rare as a Nintendo-made Halo game. Valve has also continued to aggressively support its multiplayer Team Fortress 2, a game launched alongside Portal in 2007."


...


"The company's primary vehicle for single-player-only experiences has been the one that the public hasn't seen anything new of since 2007. The campaign portions of Half-Life put players in control of hero Gordon Freeman; other players haven't been able to join the game's main adventure. While Valve has used its Half-Life games to present a more lively, less lonely first-person-shooter campaign, it has done so strictly through improving the artificial intelligence and acting of Freeman's computer-controlled allies, namely Alyx Vance (pictured with our hero above)"


...


"The comment from Valve is striking, though, in that it doesn't sound like Newell and Johnson said they'd probably never ship a game that didn't have a multiplayer mode somewhere in it. Rather, they told Keighley they "probably" wouldn't make a game "with an isolated single-player experience." That would mean no more modes that couldn't connect in some fashion to other people. Would, say, letting a second player control Alyx in Half Life 3 do the trick? Or could Valve be cooking up something less expected?"

The article also contains a few extra details about other traditionally solo games who've gone and added multiplayer or co-op, as well some hypotheses which, while interesting as a whole, hold no interest in the case of Valve. Sure, Bioshock has multiplayer deathmatch, but so did the Half-Life games, so this particular example is moot at best. But, what does this all mean? Let's break it down.


The Half-Life games were unique, because, unlike every other FPS before them, they actually had a sense of narrative, of events unfolding and putting you right in the thick of it. Personally, I love co-op. I absolutely love it. I'm not much of a multiplayer guy, mostly because I usually suck at it, but co-op is fun fun fun. But (and this is a huge but), foregoing the aforementioned sense of narrative in a Half-Life game completely would profoundly suck.


The article ends with another hypothesis: Could it be drop-in-drop-out co-op, with the second player joining in as Alyx? My initial reaction was "yeah, that could work".


But it wouldn't. You'd have to get rid of the spooky, lonesome bits altogether. The frantic chases. The solitary exploring while knowing that, at any given moment, you might be under watch, hunted. The scripted sequences that add so much depth to the characters. Also, the other person might be a git and hit you in the face with the crowbar while you're trying to solve a puzzle or fend of a Combine army. Or, simply, jump up and down all the time, ruining suspence. There's a gazillion things that can go wrong this way.


I trust Valve. I really do. If anyone can make an awesomesauce co-op campaign game, it's them. But it shouldn't be Half-Life 3. We know you're innovators, we really do, and we love you for it, Valve. But please, just this once, don't break this formula, because, for the exploits of Gordon Freeman, making it anything but a solitary experience will miss the point completely. Gordon deserves better than a crowbar to the face by a "lolnoob" guy posing as Alyx.