Portal 2 gives "you more to do, more complexity but not necessarily difficulty," says Faliszek
Valve’s Chet Faliszek has said the puzzles in Portal 2 may seem to look more difficult than the one's in Portal 1, but "more complexity," doesn't necessarily mean the gameplay is more difficult.
Speaking in an interview with VideogamesDaily, Faliszek said the development team didn't want the sequel to have the same puzzles with the difficulty raised, and instead expanded the puzzle bits out, by giving players more to do. Plus, with the added co-op, puzzles will be "equally solvable because you have two people looking at it."
"We didn’t want to just take the same puzzles and make them more difficult – we expand that out by giving you more to do, more complexity but not necessarily difficulty," he said. "So that you have all these different elements you have to pull in – you have hard light bridges now, you have tractor beams, you have all these different elements that you’re using in the game, and you add them all up and run with it.
"We bring in a lot of outside testers in to test, and it depends on the person. Some things people struggle on one person will get, some things that are super easy people will just flail at… And we try to make sure that if you know how to solve it, if you’ve figured the puzzle out, you can solve it. You don’t have this dexterity problem that you’re not going to be able to do it. And co-op is just weird, because what you see is, with two people, one person will have a block on certain kinds of puzzles, and the other person will be able to see it and get through it.
"And there’s a lot of 'just shut up and listen – follow my way, this is the way to do it'. And you’ll have these situations where you’ll say 'OK, that was one way to do it, but I bet we could have done it this way and I want to go back and play that puzzle'. There may be more complexity in co-op, but probably [the puzzles] are equally solvable because you have two people looking at it, and just having that one person help you break through when you get stuck."
Portal 2 hits North America and Australia on April 20, and Europe on April 22 for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 and will contain over 13,000 lines of dialogue.