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Tom Hopkins 12:00, Saturday 24th October 2009

The second part of our chat with EA's Alex Hutchinson about the upcoming Army Of Two sequel

What are the challenges of building a co-op game from scratch and is the experience going to be different if you play with AI?
I hope it’s not that big a delta. I think it’s a different game, that’s what the biggest challenge is. If it’s going to be co-op, but it has to be single-player with an AI as well you’re actually making two games now because there has to be the version where the AI figures out what to do and pays attention to you and doesn’t look stupid. It has all kinds of horrible problems with co-op in terms of streaming. In a single-player game if you’re in a level we can start throwing away this stuff, moving forward, start loading this stuff. In co-op we can be in a situation where you go all the way forward and I go all the ways backwards and then we have horrible streaming problems. As cheesy as it is, that’s why you see going over a fence or lifting a gate because we have to be able to guarantee at the point that they’ll be together. So that’s a big headache.

Spawning is a nightmare. In a single-player game you can fake a lot of stuff, so if the player’s facing forwards you can spawn behind them and they’ll never know. In co-op you can be back to back, you’re facing forwards and I’m facing the other way, so how do we get enemies into the environment?

“We tried to build it so any way you want to play with a friend there’ll be something there”

The cheapest thing in a co-op game is camping. If you can get to a situation where the players can find two safe spots to cover all the areas the enemies can come from there’s no game, they don’t feel any pressure.

Is doing co-op a stretch even for the big games?
I think it’s the base reason why you saw the COD guys and the Resistance guys leave out co-op and put it in its own bucket, because that awesome cinematic experience that they’re building is based on one player being in one spot and pushing you through. So, no, it’s a big headache. And I agree that players don’t – and they shouldn’t – care about the budget because it still costs $60 of their money, but the stuff it stops you doing as well is the cheap Metacritic points stuff, like the big rail ride in the middle, and the sheer amount of arts assets you just can’t do that.