Gameplay in co-op is enhanced as well, the team has mapped the d-pad to contextual commands and added a spotting ability. By doing this teams can work together in spotter/sniper kind of scenarios with one player sneaking ahead, identifying a target, and then having the other player finish him off. This works not only on enemies, but on locations and objectives.
Here’s Steiner describing the new d-pad setup:
The key thing Steiner said he wants players to take away from co-op is that everything is randomized. This includes enemy AI behavior and locations. Because of this the team feels this mode is incredibly re-playable, especially considering the custom nature of player driven campaign creation.
After co-op the game features a 32 player versus multiplayer game with a variety of game types. These will all be accessible via playlists in the game itself, and over time, Zipper will be changing things up. There will even be community playlists where the SOCOM community can vote on changes to game types that alter things like health, respawn rates, movement speed, and damage. We were also assured the game would feature “classic” gameplay types for those that feel the game has become too “accessible.”
Like most big PS3 games lately, SOCOM 4 is going to support the Move (via the Sharpshooter attachment) as well as 3D. One interesting bit of news about the Sharpshooter was that it was worked on with Killzone 3 developer Guerilla, and it was created as something that would work for both games. While we felt this worked well enough in Killzone 3, it wasn’t our go to control method. We’re anxious to see if Zipper has improved on the control scheme at all.
SOCOM 4 is shaping up to be a complete package with co-op, campaign and versus multiplayer on display. The game ships on April 19th exclusively on the PlayStation 3.