For those of you who were hoping to play The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes with one other friend, you are out of luck. According to an interview with director Hiromasa Shikata earlier this week with Kotaku, the co-op mode that was announced at E3 2015 is only available to three people, due largely to puzzle design.
He also noted that should a player have to leave, a replacement must be found or the two remaining players must shift to single player mode.
Shikata sounds kind of like he’s reading from the Book of Armaments in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.”
There is, however, a game mode capable of being played with two people (or three…but not four), called Colosseum, which is entirely competitive.
Is the game being rushed in development?
While Kotaku seems to think that the single player mode will be solid, some commenters seem to have worries about the game being rushed.
Others even consider the lack of two player co-op a deal breaker.
The choice to design all the puzzles for three players, and to program single-player to work with these puzzles (with two controllable, mindless Links at a single player’s disposal), but to not program a two-player function that operates similarly to the single player is just bizarre. Why not program separate puzzles for single, two, and three player modes, and a possible four player mode? Like a commenter above noted, this reeks of rushed development.
And a rushed Zelda game, or any game for that matter, is not a good game. We have known main series Zelda games to often be delayed by a few years, only to turn out so well that the extra time was truly worth it. I think this is a design choice worth reconsidering, given that a lot of people seem upset by it.
