Nioh, Team Ninja’s difficult game, touted as “Samurai Bloodborne” by fans, came out on February 7th as a PlayStation 4 exclusive. It was well received, but fans are upset about some changes from the demo build.
Demo players found the game’s cooperative play extremely fun, some even planning ahead to play through the game with their friends. However, it turns out the game won’t have true co-op at all. You can only enter your friend’s game if you’ve beaten the map they’re on, meaning you need to be a step ahead of your buddy in order to play with him at all, or play through solo in order to help them along for your second run of Nioh.
Tom Lee, creative director of the game told Kotaku that this was the plan from the beginning, “You cannot co-op through the entire game because that would make it too easy for players to beat the game. 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.”
Instead of upping enemy difficulty when you have a battle buddy, they’d rather toss it all together and save it for a later playthrough. It’s an interesting choice, but its true to the feel of the game.