Max Payne 3: a co-op mode canceled by Rockstar (GTA 5) resurfaces, new information!

Game News Max Payne 3: a co-op mode canceled by Rockstar (GTA 5) resurfaces, new information!

Payne reduction

Coming from a particularly cult franchise concocted by Remedy, Max Payne 3 was developed by Rockstar and had blown more than one person when it was released in May 2012, almost a decade ago. It was a brutal third-person shooter, with ultra-impactful sensations and spicy difficulty, all wrapped in a dark and somewhat tortured atmosphere. A very good vintage.

Ten years after its release, the game from the starred R firm has just revealed a new secret, revealed by an anonymous source to Global Games Media : the prologue of the game had to be playable in cooperation, with two players!

The London studio worked on it for about a year before this whole co-op campaign mode was dropped. Emphasis has been placed on multiplayer modes, including Gang Wars. Some of the maps ended up in the single-player campaign.

Basically, a player therefore had to take control of Max Payne and another of his former friend from New York, wandering through the places of the Big Apple such as the alleys, the cemetery or the Panama Canal. So many passages that will eventually be scattered throughout the single-player campaign of the final game, while that the concept of cooperation will be brought later by the DLC “Dead Men Walking”. This one opted for PvE where two players faced waves of enemies controlled by artificial intelligence.

Co-ops in co-op

It is not specified why this scripted co-op mode was abandoned. In contrast, the source affirms that it nevertheless remained a real challenge to achieve, in particular to integrate bullet-time (the very essence of Max Payne) in a multiplayer campaign.

It took real imagination on the part of the lead designer in London to solve a double problem: first, that of ensuring that all players were not slowed down by someone triggering bullet-time out of his view. Then, that of not disadvantaging the player triggering the bullet time by making him move slowly in slow motion while the rest of the world continued in real time.

We actually imagine that these mechanics were an obvious headache for the developers.

As for the scenario, it followed Max and his friend, both ex-cops extricating themselves from New York to become security consultants in Brazil. New levels had been imagined (like that of the complex of a bizarre cult or a mine of precious stones) while others have finally been implemented in the solo mode that everyone knows (all the passages of New York, precisely).

I don’t know how many elements would have survived the game’s release, but they were trying to piece together abandoned single-player levels from the main campaign into a new story. It was a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Finally, the cancellation of the co-op mode was pronounced and, obviously, painfully received by the developers after more than a year of work. This was nevertheless effective because it allowed to better focus on single player and multiplayer.

I think it’s possible to make a great co-op campaign for Max Payne, but you have to design the game entirely around that rather than trying to add it to a single-player game design.

Suffice to say that with a new Grand Theft Auto in development and the growing importance of GTA Online, exemplified recently with the paid GTA + subscription, we are not about to see this good old Max on our PCs and consoles again. At first glance, at least.