Syndicate Doesn’t Have an Online Pass

Electronic Arts has confirmed that the upcoming Syndicate first person shooter won’t be protected with an online pass system, largely because the company wants all gamers to experience the cooperative multiplayer mode from the shooter.

EA recently decided to bring back to life its old Syndicate franchise and asked Starbreeze to do this. There’s a pretty big catch, however, as the upcoming game is a first person shooter, not a real time strategy one, like the original titles.

While this decision didn’t exactly please fans of the original strategy games, the special visual style and unique setting made at least a few people curious about the game.

Now, in order to make sure that lots of people experience everything Syndicate has to offer, EA has confirmed that an online pass isn’t going to be included. In case you forgot, such a system is designed to prevent players with second hand copies of a game from accessing certain functions, like a multiplayer mode.

The reasoning behind this decision, at least according to EA Partners Executive Producer Jeff Gamon, is that the company wants to make sure all players, both those with new copies and people who have used ones, get to experience Syndicate and its features, especially its co-op mode.

"We want as little resistance or barriers to entry as possible," Gamon told Eurogamer. "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.”

Gamon elaborated, saying that EA was also quite confident in Syndicate’s co-op mode, so it wouldn’t try to impose arbitrary restrictions, like with regular Online Passes.

"Maybe another reason for not having the Online Pass is we were confident in the scope of the online game,” he added. "There are nine maps. It's hard to say, but just to play through the maps once on normal is a good six, seven hours. To progress your character and upgrade a few weapons is a heap of content. That and the single-player campaign means hopefully we won't see much in the way of early second hand sales and rentals."

Considering Syndicate is trying to get people once again interested in an old series, the elimination of the Online Pass is probably a good idea.