Ever since rumours have been kicked around that Dead Space 3 would receive a cooperative mode, fans began to worry that they might not get the game they wanted. When the piece of gameplay was released at E3 it seemed pretty obvious that while horror did still play a bigger role than in other games, the fear factor was definitely toned down.

Although the amped up action elements played a major role in reducing the scares, the addition of a cooperative partner clearly changed the entire theme, with in-combat chatter and the odds not feeling so overwhelming anymore.

In a recent interview with MCV, EA Games’ Marketing Boss Laura Miele has revealed that the addition of co-op in Dead Space 3 was made because the previous titles were “pretty scary”.

Miele explains:

“We were doing research coming out of Dead Space 1 and 2 and we’re really proud of those products. We received feedback to understand how we can take the game out to even more consumers.

“We were hearing feedback that they love the thriller game, but it was pretty scary, and the obvious next step was that they wanted to play with someone. So we introduced co-op into the game.

“The horror of Dead Space is still all there. It’s still true to its roots and no less scary, but people felt far more comfortable playing it with someone else than they did doing it on their own.

“Personally, I would rather go to scary movie with my husband rather than sit at home with the lights out watching one on my own. We’re looking for that to reach out to consumers that perhaps were not open to Dead Space 1 and 2.”

My first guess after reading this was that EA tested Dead Space on casual gamers to see how they could broaden their sales demographic. Even the producers behind Resident Evil have acknowledged the fact that the survival horror market is a small one.

Now this could simply be my opinion, as many would agree with me that EA’s survival horror franchise is definitely not so frightening that it becomes unplayable. Maybe they should have sat players in front of Amnesia before letting them take Dead Space for a spin.

Assuming that the developers were actually concerned with the level of horror in their game, their justification does not make much sense in my opinion. Supposedly playing with someone else would be better than doing so alone, Miele even compares this to watching a horror movie. I guess that split-screen co-op would take care of this, however just yesterday in an interview with the , Dead Space 3′s executive producer, Steve Papoutsis, stated:

“It’s actually going to be online co-op and the thinking was—the idea of split-screen we did kick that around a little bit [but] that would absolutely detract from any kind of … we thought it was going to detract too much from the immersion.”

If adding co-op was supposed to serve as an expansion to the gameplay, the creators of Dead Space 3 should have never created John Carver as Isaac’s partner. Including Carver as the second playable character makes him relevant to the story and mandatory to the experience. Suddenly Isaac and Carver must solve puzzles together, hallways are not dark and desolate, instead you hear the protagonists bantering with one another.

Trying to make a game “more accessible to newcomers” is always something that turns me off, in my eyes this phrase means nothing more than “we want to sell more”. If developers are altering the way a game is played in the third instalment of a series, they are not making anything more accessible, they are changing the original product.

Although I strongly believe that the co-op gameplay will be taking from the single player experience, as development resources are being allocated to this mode, playing this game on your one will luckily not add an NPC on your side, but instead leave you on your own.