Visceral left co-op out of Dante's Inferno to avoid release slip

Dante's Inferno lead designer Greg Rizzer has said that it was a "big decision" to include co-op play in the upcoming Trials of St. Lucia DLC.

Speaking to VG247 during a round-table interview, Rizzer said that the development team wanted to "differentiate itself" from the market, and online co-op "blows the scope of the game"" way up there.

"One of the things we wanted to do was differentiate ourselves from the market," said Rizzer. "Taking a game online blows the scope of your product way up. So when they were crafting the single-player, the co-op team didn't start production until the single-player was well along. Then, we looked at DLC instead for the co-op in order because we wanted to minimize the risk of a shipping slip.

"So since this was a big experience pack with leaderboards, ratings, etc., it immediately increased the scope of the product. So since we didn't want to hurt the single-player, we waited and added it as DLC".

Rizzer also revealed that since St. Lucia flies around, there were tech limitations to her with her different movements and mechanics. Therefore, not only did she not fit into the spaces designed for the single-player experience, she didn't fit in with the single-player part of the story either.

Also, because of how Lucia works, split-screen co-op would not have worked for her either.

"You need ample space for Lucia to be how she is," said Rizzer. "We could not due splitscree for this because iif you try to, you have to render characters on the same screen and in order to do that we would have lost 60FPS due to technical cuts.

"Personally, I miss couch play co-op a lot, but as games get more and more complicated and complex it is becoming where online gaming is taking over that whole genre".

Trails of St. Lucia lands on PS3 and Xbox 360 April 29 for $9.99/800 MSP.

You can read the rest of our discussion with Rizzer through here and here.