God, this thread is a fucking dumpster fire.
Team Ninja removes weapon degradation from the alpha because the majority of people didn't like it? "Good job team ninja listening to user feed back"
Team ninja explains why coop was changed, a large portion of people hate it " good job team ninja respecting your vision for a game. This thing that has no effect on me what so ever but is pissing off a large portion of your fans should not be changed"
Absolutely Fucking ridiculous.
Oh come off it, it's reasonable for people to dislike a change or for a developer to missread the desires of their community. This is especially likely to be the case when TM's own justification doesn't quite add up, I think they miss interpreted this one and implemented the wrong change.
Personally I think that not enough people discussed how much they appreciated how the co-op worked because they thought it was assumed that wasn't something that wasn't likely to change.
I did feel that summoning had the capacity to make the game too easy in the alpha and demos, but what I did was chose not to summon. It's even worse now, as the players that join you are of a much higher standard (they have already beaten the level).
This is spot-on. The people saying 'well why is coop in the game at all??' should read this.
Souls and Souls-like games have their difficulty as a major selling point, and coop does indeed make the games significantly easier. That doesn't mean the devs want to remove the option completely -- they just want to make it more limited in use, so that you can use it to break past a brick-wall boss rather than be stuck and frustrated for too long.
To me the Nioh system sounds fine -- I played the Souls games largely alone, only calling in help if I had failed a boss 5 times or more and was getting frustrated rather than getting more determined to beat the boss. From the sounds of it I could do the exact same in Nioh, which sounds fine.
I understand why people are annoyed by this change, since the demo was different, but Souls games have not been all-or-nothing on the coop front -- it's always been limited coop, rather than 'coop everything' or 'coop nothing'. This sounds pretty similar and fits the Souls-like gameplay of the game.
Personally rather than more restrictive I'd like to see co-op feature less restrictions (as in, not needing to have both beaten the level before) but a little variation so that it's not just an easier version of the same level. Add a few enemies in so that previous instances of one versus one encounters become 2 vs 2, provide a few surprises for players who've already beaten the level and think they know what they're doing, and perhaps most significantly adjust the bosses so that they accomodate co-operative play.
Every boss in the game should have one or two attacks or forms designed to combat two players. At the moment they are almost all 'single target' foes, but it makes sense that they would fight differently if confronted by two foes. There's some really cool things they could do with co-operative play if they embraced it rather than hiding it away. After all, co-op makes the game easier because they've designed the game that way, so to restrict it away is only to hide a problem that they haven't addressed.
Like I say, there's some really cool things you could do. Imagine if bosses could split in two, summon help, featured more attacks capable of being directed at multiple players. What if certain bosses could summon enemy Phantoms (enemy players) to help them in the fight? There's loads of cool things they could do that would allow co-operative play to feature in the game without simply making it tacked on. The shared lifebar system is neat but ultimately it's a compensatory system that tries to hide the real problems with co-op in this type of game. The enemies and stages were clearly not designed for co-operative play, and if they want it to be well-integrated then making some more meaningful accommodations in the level design itself would be the most interesting approach.
While it is perhaps too late for that, I don't think restricting co-op away from people, especially away from people wanting to participate in co-op with blind players (players who like them, have never seen the level before) is in any way the answer to the challenges that co-operative systems in these type of games need to overcome.