Why Bulletstorm's campaign isn't co-op

Bulletstorm's campaign is single-player only because co-op broke it.

That's the frank admission from Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski, who is helping to promote People Can Fly's eye-catching upcoming shooter.

"First off, it was in there at one point and it actually worked, but we found that the game shifted from being this kind of puzzle shooter into essentially this downhill skiing simulator, where people were seeing how fast they could get to the bottom of the mountain," he told The Daily Telegraph.

"Really the game just broke down, and it was a situation where people would race through the game, ignoring the vistas and they wouldn't set up as many skillshots.

"So when we made the decision to go straight campaign, it gave us the chance to put in one-offs that could only be controlled by one player, like the giant robotic dinosaur, where you don't have to worry about Player 2, or slow motion one-offs that could only occur in a single player game."

While Bulletstorm's campaign is a single-player only affair, the game does feature co-operative modes in its multiplayer portion.

Anarchy mode, for example, is a co-op team based multiplayer mode for up to four-players. They face off against continuous waves of increasingly difficult enemies. – a bit like Gears of War 2's Horde mode.

But Bulletstorm's multiplayer doesn't include traditional deathmatch. Indeed you won't be shooting other players at all. Why?

"We empower the player through the verbiage and the weapons so much that if you were in multiplayer on the receiving end of that, it would be the most agonising, unpleasant experience," Bleszinski explained.

"It is a solvable problem, I do believe, but it would basically require building an entirely new game that is in many ways not even Bulletstorm.

"The flail gun, for example, where you wrap up enemies for up to six seconds, which would be an eternity if you're playing an online first person shooter. People in Gears of War, where we'd have a pause for half a second for an explosion or something, were raging, they wanted to keep moving.

"It could be something that could happen, but in this day and age, with the Wild Wild West nature of Xbox Live or PSN, where for every friend made there's someone insulting you, I'm a fan of co-op. I like the idea of four players teaming up, cracking open some beers and having a good time together."