PASSENGER SEATS
Vehicle positions beyond the driver — gunner turrets, open truck beds, co-pilot seats — letting multiple characters or players share one vehicle with differentiated roles.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME
- COMMON IN SHOOTER · CO-OP · OPEN-WORLD · VEHICULAR
Halo's Warthog is the archetype (driver steers, gunner fights, passenger prays), Battlefield builds squad play around multi-crew transports and armor, Sea of Thieves makes the entire ship a set of passenger stations (helm, sails, cannons, bilge), and GTA-likes use passenger seats for drive-by mechanics and narrative cargo. Designers add passenger seats because they convert vehicles from personal tools into cooperation machines: the driver-gunner split is an instant trust exercise that produces more emergent comedy and camaraderie per design dollar than almost any deliberate social feature — your life is literally in a friend's hands, and the role asymmetry (steering versus shooting) means two mediocre players in one Warthog are a different organism than two solo players. Passenger positions also solve the multiplayer pacing problem of travel time, turning transit into shared experience rather than parallel waiting. Key decisions: how much agency passengers get (fixed turrets, free-aim weapons, or pure cargo — bored passengers exit moving vehicles), seat-swapping fluidity mid-motion, and AI passengers in single-player (companions who board and fight from vehicles versus awkwardly teleporting alongside). Pitfall: passenger-as-spectator — a seat that offers nothing to do teaches players to never take it, and multi-crew vehicles designed around cooperation become solo vehicles with empty chairs; every seat needs a verb.
SEEN IN
- HALO INFINITE
- SEA OF THIEVES
- BATTLEFIELD 2042