Who gets the ammo clip? Who needs the health more? Annoying questions to have to constantly ask yourself, but even more annoying when you don’t get the chance to ask them because your jerk of a co-op buddy swept through the room and grabbed all the loot while you were dissecting the necromorphs that were dropping from the ceiling. Oh, and everything you collected in co-op you bring back with you into solo.Ī little, yes, because that solves another major pet peeve of co-op gaming (this one’s mine): item allocation. Even if you were playing as Carver in co-op, you can resume the story as Isaac when tackling the campaign on your own. It’s a common co-op frustration, but not one you’ll face with Dead Space 3. Then he never seems to want to play when you do, so either you have to wait for him, or start all over again from scratch. Difficult enough, but then Papoutsis wanted the game’s co-op to crush one of his own personal gaming pet peeves : the “good save.” You know how it goes – you and your buddy are working through the game together, but he’s player 1 and so the save lives on his machine. First off, it’s drop-in/drop-out, so the story needed to be flexible enough to adapt to whether it was just series hero Isaac Clarke in the scene or if tough guy John Carver was with him.

The co-op in Dead Space 3 was about as gnarly a knot as it could possibly have been to create. “Let me tell you,” he explains, “it was very difficult to create a game that allows for drop-in/drop-out, that’s why you don’t see it so much. Mostly, though, he hopes you like it because the team at Visceral worked really, really hard on it. Part of that undoubtedly has to do with his belief that co-op is a great way for you to introduce a game to your friends, and given that EA claimed Dead Space 3 needed to sell “around five million copies for the franchise to be worth a continued investment, the more people talking about it, the better.

Steve Papoutsis, executive producer of Dead Space 3 really hopes you like the game’s co-op.

Dead space 1 co op