Recently I tried playing through Harvest Red's campaign in co-op mode with a friend of mine. We had tried once shortly after the game's release a long time ago and found it was a bug-ridden mess, so decided to hold off until more updates could be put out.
Now that the game's been patched we tried again, but still had quite a few problems. This included:
*Client players dying during certain vehicle transportation segments due to improperly-handled ejection events - in the mission where you start on the APC and then switch to bicycles for example, my friend always got launched from the vehicle before it stopped at lethal velocity, while the rest of us auto-mounted the bicycles. He always died again and again in this mission because of that, and the only way to fix this was to start the mission without him in it, and have him join in-progress after everyone had gotten off the APC. We had a couple other missions where this was the case too - the client's unit would simply die during transportation segments for various reasons unless the player wasn't actually in the game when those segments happened.
*Broken gameplay mechanics; client players couldn't really trigger events or properly interact with certain objective items, only the host / team lead player could. This made it a bit more frustrating on missions like Razor Two where we wanted to coordinate our efforts across a large area of land. In a few respects this made some sense (Cooper being the key multi-lingual officer on the team makes him a requisite for interacting with civilians for example), but it was kinda frustrating for some other scripted events which simply wouldn't play unless the host was present. I always had to drop what I was doing and fly to the other end of a map just so some unforeseen, scripted 'attack' event would occur and we could progress in the mission properly - and if we didn't know this attack was supposed to occur, would end up overlooking parts of the mission when my friend passed through an area and saw nothing happened.
*What was most frustrating of all for my friend though was the part towards the tail end of the campaign where the base-building comes into play. This is a cool concept from a co-operative standpoint, except that client players never get the chance to command their own squads - they all remain part of the lead player's squad. This means they're cut out of the ability to buy their own units and place them under their command. The bigger problem with this was that my friend kept losing the ability to properly order the AI around during the campaign; I'd give him a tank with a gunner and driver for example while he acted as commander, but the AI mysteriously stopped responding to commands like 'forward, reverse', targeting commands, and firing - he basically couldn't order the crew around at all in any of the tanks he manned unless he did all the work himself, which defeated the point. Meanwhile if I got in the tank, the vehicle's crew responded to all my orders fine of course, so something was just preventing him from properly being able to 'command' the vehicle. I was of the impression players should still be able to do this even if they aren't the squad leader.
This was in contrast to the vastly enjoyable experience that Operation: Arrowhead's campaign offered.. it was immensely cool playing that one level where my friend got to work chopper support while I led a ground convoy of tanks, for example, or other missions where we could get a third player in leading their own infantry team - we could work in tandem and use our unique teams tactically to help each other out. In the Harvest Red campaign, client players are just 'slaved' to the host's orders and whatever their single unit can do, which works just fine for the initial smaller-scale missions but fails horribly once the mission complexity opens up a bit more.
A lot of these problems feel more inherent to the mission's design than actual gameplay code, so I'm curious if anyone has been able to crack the campaign files open to fix this yet. If not, is there a way to get into this data so that I could try my hand at making the campaign a little more co-op friendly for us? We had a fun time with the campaign but feel it'd be a lot better if it actually took advantage of the complexity Arma2 is capable of and made it available to all players, not just the host - even if this means breaking the sub-characters (Sykes, Rodriguez, O'Hara) into their own individual squads for the "co-op" variant of these levels.
