After years of neglect, cooperative play is finally back in the limelight thanks to successful games like Halo and Gears of War. However, few games fully embrace the feature to the extent that EA's upcoming Army of Two (PS3, X360) does.

I spoke with producer Reid Schneider--who noted the team's reliance on the mantra "co-op's not the mode, co-op is the game"--about how and why Army of Two places such a heavy focus on having two players work through a campaign collaboratively. Don't skip the second page of the interview, which delves into the intriguing political backdrop of Army of Two, the post-9/11 world of private military corporations such as Blackwater and Aegis.

For more detailed gameplay impressions, check out today's coverage from our own Carlos Bergfeld.

Shack: This is an unusual concept for a game. How did the team go about conceiving and pitching it?

Reid Schneider: Initially when we began thinking about what we wanted to make for Army of Two, we had a lot of different ideas. We knew we wanted to focus on co-op, that was really core for us. We had some ideas, but we didn't know the exact setting we wanted to do. Back on Xbox 1, there were a couple interesting co-op experiences, and then if you think back to Contra or Double Dragon, there were some, but when we were first thinking about this nobody had really nailed it on next-gen consoles yet.

Really our core focus from the ground up was that you need to play co-op with your partner, you need to cooperate to survive. In other games, co-op is more like an add-on. In Army of Two, co-op's not the mode, co-op is the game. As we began to research more and more, we started looking--well, there was an article in Time about the world of private military corporations.

This was about three years ago, so it was before, you know, Blackwater was center stage in the news. We did more research and thought, this is really really interesting. It's not just the U.S. government--governments worldwide are really invested in this as a business. We said, that's a great backdrop for us to craft this co-op experience. We researched companies like Halliburton, like Blackwater, like DynCorp, like Aegis, and that's our setting, then we started building everything around that.

Shack: In the last few years, Halo has been big with co-op, and as far as earlier examples, a lot of readers are PC users who have been playing co-op all the way back to Doom as well as with console or arcade games like Double Dragon. Still, there was a big period of not much co-op, and even Halo and Gears of War haven't seemed to really push the feature into genuinely new territory gameplay-wise. How did you guys sit down and try to move forward?

Reid Schneider: Yeah, I mean you're totally right. Obviously, in the past few years, Gears has a cool co-op experience and Halo does as well, but those are more add-ons. We sat down and did a lot of brainstorming, and asked what would be interesting to do during co-op. We had ideas like taking a riot shield and your partner is behind you shooting, or things like co-op sniping with synchronous sniping techniques, and co-op parachuting.

We had tons of ideas. I mean, some make it in the game and some don't. We prototyped a ton of them, and then we took the best ones and pushed those forward into the game. As a design philosophy--and the team deserves all the credit for this--it was, it doesn't go into the game unless it's really focused around co-op, unless each person in the game has an interesting activity to do. A lot of times, we had an interesting idea, but it's like, okay, that's good for one of the players, but what does the other guy do? If that happens, that didn't go in the game.

Shack: Though this game doesn't technically require two people, since it can use an AI player, co-op is integral to the game as you said. EA is a mass market company that makes mass appeal games--were there any reservations at a company like that making a game so focused around having two people?

Reid Schneider: I think we probably did make some people nervous. [laughs] Video games aren't a small investment these days. You can't really just make them in the garage with your friends. So I think, yeah, it definitely made some people nervous. We pushed really hard, and I think the execs believed in what we were doing, but yeah, obviously, the bet I believe will pay off.

I think now you're seeing this resurgence of interest in co-op more than you have in any other time. That's great for us, because it means that what we believed a few years ago is on the right track. We're just happy to see that come through.

Shack: One thing I always find interesting is when big-budget "hardcore" games--even games in which combat and shooting is the core focus--contain gameplay mechanics that aren't entirely focused around combat. One really extreme example recently is Portal--

Reid Schneider: Amazing game.

Shack: Yeah, amazing game. So that's kind of an extreme example, but even in Army of Two I find it really interesting that you do often have a guy who's helping the other guy up and pushing him over the wall, or holding the shield while the other guy shoots, or whatever. What processes did you go through to make sure it works even if you're not shooting every moment?

Reid Schneider: I think we spent a lot of time on that. You mentioned the step jump [allowing one player to boost another up above a wall]. Initially it was a completely digital experience, where you just walked over and hit the button, and he walked over to you and you lifted him up.

What we found is that, like you said, that's kind of boring. So we added the aspect where it's analog, where you can now lift the guy up and lower him down as you move the analog stick, so that if there are enemies on the other side, he can say, "Lift me up," and you can lift him up and he'll take some shots, then he can say, "Take me down now," so he doesn't get capped in the head.

It was thinking about things, and that's a good example, of thinking about things that you'd normally do alone, and making that experience fun for both guys. And it's hard. [laughs] It didn't happen overnight. Credit goes to the design team and our engineers for coming up with that stuff, and our animators as well, and for coming up with ways to make it so both players have an interesting role to do.

Shack: Action games with military themes are generally in the first person. Why not this one? Was it a practical measure to give you more peripheral vision so you can see what your buddy is up to?

Reid Schneider: I think there was definitely that, and I think it's also that it's hard to make a first-person game where you give a really strong identity to your character. We really wanted to make this a character-focused game.

You look at a game like Half-Life, or really almost any other first-person shooter, and you are the character. When you see your character doing stuff on the screen in third person, you develop more of a relationship with that character. You want to see the interesting things that character is doing. It's just a difference. If you want to build a character-focused game, third person is really the area, at least in our opinion, and the way to build a character.

Turn the page for Schneider's thoughts on the political situations at the root of the game's setting--September 11, private military corporations, the military-industrial complex, and more.