Syndicate Won’t Use Online Pass

You ever have one of those days where you read something you weren’t expecting at all, and it hits you that much harder? Well it turns out that EA and Starbreeze‘s reboot of Syndicate will not use an online pass.

EA Partners executive producer Jeff Gamon told Eurogamer the following:

We want as little resistance or barriers to entry as possible. The co-op is equal billing in this. We wanted everyone who owns a copy of the game to have access to the entire product. Under normal circumstances it would have had an online pass, but because it didn’t have competitive multiplayer and because we wanted as many people as possible to be playing co-op, we got away with it.

Maybe another reason for not having the Online Pass is we were confident in the scope of the online game. Throughout the nine multiplayer maps, players can expect a good six, seven hours on a single playthrough. That and the single-player campaign means hopefully we won’t see much in the way of early second hand sales and rentals.

It should be noted that Syndicate isn’t the first game to scrape by without the online pass. Both Crysis 2 and Portal 2 didn’t have an online pass. Although, if they added a pass to Portal 2, Gabe Newell probably would have delayed the game out of spite.

Now if you’ll excuse me, a pig just flew into my window.