A source close to Rockstars Max Payne 3 development revealed that the game had a co-op campaign that lasted over a year before being axed. In an interview with USA TODAY, a source familiar with Rockstar Games’ work on Max Payne 3 revealed that the London-based studio spent a year working on the collaborative prologue campaign.
However, everything was not in vain; USA Today claims that Rockstar may have repurposed some of the deleted content for the New York sections featured in Max Payne 3’s story campaign. However, Max Payne 3’s key story had only a handful of missions set in Max’s previous days in New York. The -op prologue appears to have repurposed the graduation designs of the sport’s key marketing campaign, as well as an entire memory of New York City. The campaign served as an introduction to the story, with the co-op playing one of Max’s old NYPD associates and arguably providing insight into Max Payne 3’s often dark past. The marketing campaign would have served as a prologue to the main entertainment story, with an accomplice acting as one of Max’s outdated NYPD comrades and possibly offering insight into the collection’s former protagonist, the often enigmatic Max Payne.
This bullet mode appears to have been one of the biggest challenges in developing the co-marketing campaign mode, which was to be launched as sports downloadable content. This speed mode was clearly one of the biggest challenges when designing the co-op campaign mode for the DLC release of Max Payne 3. One of the biggest challenges when designing the prologue co-op campaign was ensuring bulletproof timing worked with several players at the same time. Another development challenge was also how to get slow-motion immersion the mechanical feature of Remedy Games’ iconic anti-hero to work with two players.
Taking control of Max and one of his old fellow NYC cops, the co-op prologue campaign saw two players shoot and dive in bullet mode through modified versions of the single-player maps, including the back streets of New York, cemetery, Panama Canal, and more. The story outline followed Remedy Games’ iconic anti-hero and his partner leaving New York after Max retired from the military, and ended up both working as security consultants in Brazil. Max Payne 3 takes the story from the crime-ridden streets of New York to sunny Co-Paulo but maintains the same gritty pace the shooter series is known for. Max Payne 3 was released in 2012 to positive reviews, but it didn’t sell like other Rockstar games like Grand Theft Auto, so it’s likely that Rockstar isn’t planning a new game in the franchise.
While Max Payne 3 was well-reviewed and received post-launch DLC, there’s little to suggest that Rockstar Games will return to Max Payne in the future. Since the release, the most recent news from Max Payne has been the announcement of the addition of the trilogy to the Xbox Backward Compatibility Library on Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S. If you’ve been following the Max Payne 3 achievements so far, you’ll remember that Rockstar announced last August that the “New York Minute Co-Op” DLC would be included in the next Deathmatch Made in Heaven package.
