Nioh dev one-ups Dark Souls by saying unlimited co-op is "too easy"

Nioh doesn't have an easy mode - unlike its soft Dark Souls rival.

Nioh developer Team Ninja has spoken out on changes to the action RPG's co-op system, which mean players need to have completed an area before they can play through it with a buddy.

Unfortunately for those hoping to hold hands and skip gently through the fearsome enemies of Nioh, it sounds like Team Ninja never intended for players to be able to cut the difficulty by enrolling a pal.

“You cannot co-op through the entire game because that would make it too easy for players to beat the game,” Nioh creative director Tom Lee told Kotaku.

“We want players to experience Nioh in how it was intended to be. We allowed players to co-op anytime in the last trial demo only because of the limited stages and time to try out the demo.”

So basically, while co-op provides Dark Souls with an easy mode, Nioh sticks to its guns - it's meant to be super hard and you're not going to wriggle out of it by getting a high level buddy in to assist you.

Although it's a perfectly reasonable stance for the developers to take, the fact that Nioh's co-op system changed between the demo and release day, with no communication from Team Ninja on the subject, is probably going to make people unhappy: if you bought Nioh hoping to play through it in co-op easy mode, you'd be pretty livid.

Speaking as a big fan of co-op easy mode and cheesing in the Souls games, I'm consigning Nioh to the "ha ha, no" pile with no shame, unless Team Ninja has a sudden change of heart.