Games with a collaborative social element

[happyninja42]

Shadow of War (maybe Shadow of Mordor too, its been too long and I don't remember) had some minor elements of this. If an orc killed one player, that orc could show up in my game for me to "avenge" the other player. What I don't know is if that in any way affected that other player, I don't remember ever seeing any kind of notification that I had ever been "avenged" but maybe something happened.

Yeah Surge 2 has something similar, but YOU get rewarded for avenging someone else. You get a nice little stack of crafting resources for taking out the flagged target. I don't think you ever get any notification of someone avenging you, as I sure haven't seen one. And while I haven't died too often in that game, I have definitely died plenty of times overall. It's also got another social layer of a game of hide and seek. You can place a banner (little holographic shot of your character) in any random location you want, and if other players get close enough to it on their game map, it will pop up and they can click on it. The fewer people that find your banner, the more of a scrap reward you get. So you want to try and stick it in really obscure locations. That's not really a "helping each other out" thing though, but early on, it can be a nice boost to your leveling/crafting, as you can do it every 1 hour.

I like how Sekiro takes it a step further where you can record remnants on top of messages for other players to help guide them visually, which has helped me at least a couple of times for secrets I would’ve gone to a wiki for.

That's pretty cool, the echo system. The spray system in Surge 2 is really handy, as you can literally leave graffiti messages (3 characters) giving tips to people. The problem is the symbols can be a little abstract, making the message confusing. Plus, you have to find vendors to buy the sprays yourself, if you want to also leave messages, thus limiting your vocabulary if you haven't thought to grab those. They can be super useful though, with people pointing out hidden resource items, or enemies set up for ambush.

What I'd like to see, is something similar to what WoW did with one of the expansions. I forget the name of it, but it was the desert themed one. And each server had to do a collective resource mission, donating supplies to the expeditionary group, who were blazing a trail into the new zone. That was a neat thing to give the entire server a single goal for a while.

I'd like to see something similar to that, but in a single play game, that has some kind of meta-level content. Like my above mentioned multiverse game idea, where everyone playing, contributes to some cloud level objective, that will benefit everyone that helped out.