Max Payne 3 might be a decade old, but it still lives in the imaginations of those who played it, with the game taking that lovable Payne chap to the streets of Brazil. It was a weighty, noir-ish shooter with some of Rockstar's finest gunplay, even if it overdid it on the boozy-woozy filters. Now it's come to light that Max Payne 3 could've been even more memorable as the game originally contained an entire prologue co-op campaign.
As USA Today's reported, May Payne 3 was intended to have a co-op story. Although Max Payne 3 did get a DLC called Dead Men Walking, which was a co-op wave defense mode, nine months after it launched, this other co-op mode was cut during development.
The co-op campaign would've seen players stylishly dive in slo-mo through New York alleyways, the Panama Canal, and other altered versions of the single-player maps. Since the mode would've been co-op, two players would control Max and one of his ex-cop buddies from New York. According to an unnamed source, who spoke with FTW, Rockstar's London studio worked on this co-op campaign mode for about a year before it was dropped in favour of multiplayer modes such as Gang Wars. However, not all work was lost as some of the maps created for the co-op prologue ended up in the single-player campaign.
Apparently, one of the biggest challenges of working on the two-player story was how t🎃o make the signature bullet-time mechanic the series is famous for work with two players. The source told FTW that having one player trigger bullet-time while others were in real-time was a problem overcome with the "line-of-sight chain concept", which was a real "moment of inspiration".
The co-op campaign's story would've seen Max and his pal leave New York to work as security detail in Brazil, which would've then seen them deliver their unique style of work to locations including a South American gem mine and a level set in a strange cult compound. FTW's source said that, ultimately, it was a good decision to abandon this co-op mode to focus on the single-player as "you've got to design a game around it rather than try to add it to a single-player game design".