Arkley said:
I am honestly both surprised and overjoyed to see not just that plenty of other people here want co-op in Skyrim, but the absence of infuriated warbling about why it should never happen. It almost makes me feel like RPG gamers are growing out of the "everything should be the way I like it and no other way, for my way is best" phase.
Of course, the threads about Mass Effect 3 go a long way to damaging my faith in my fellow gamers on that topic, but there you have it. I guess Skyrim is so damn good that even ardent single-player-ONLY gamers can see why people might want to share the adventure with friends.
The main problem with Bethesda adding co-op to game is economics. Since Bethesda does not have infinite manpower and resources, they must make choices about what to produce. That's just basic opportunity cost, I think we can agree on that. Redesigning the game to accommodate co-op would be a rather lengthy endeavour, assuming that they actually put forth the effort to make it something people would want to play. They would have to take the time to make the design decisions so that the whole thing didn't crash and burn at release, pay programmers to make the necessary changes to the game's code, and set up and maintain the servers to actually run it. All in all, that's a lot of capital consumed to produce the product.
However, Bethesda could also use those same resources to either A) work on single player DLC for Skyrim, or B) work on a different project, such as the next Fallout game. Since Bethesda has finite resources, diverting resources to developing and maintaining co-op would mandate that they assign fewer resources to single-player content. Again, opportunity cost. Since fewer resources would be assigned to these products, there's an increased likelihood that they would be of inferior quality.
Now, adding co-op might increase sales of the game, thus alleviating the loss of resources. However, that's only a might, especially when you consider that they would be releasing this onto a market already saturated with quality co-op focused games. It
might increase revenue, but we
know that it would be diverting resources from other projects in the meantime.
In short: adding co-op to the game would not necessarily impact the game in a negative way, but it would probably impact the quality of future products.