Resident Evil 6 to take a wrecking ball to fear and tension by way of six-player co-op? Don't panic yet

Step one: Acknowledge criticisms that your last "horror" game wasn't scary at all, due to too much half-arsed, identity-muddling action and a perpetually present co-op partner/big meaty hindrance.

Step two: Release a far more exciting trailer for your follow-up, showing off proper, full-arsed action and scary, zombie-flooded isolation in equal measure.

Step three: Screw it all up just as everyone is getting excited, by throwing in the monumental clusterf*ck of six-player co-op?

Above: The only horror is the multitude of '90s fringes

I hope not. Christ, I really do hope not. But that's the current rumour going around, after some potential Resident Evil 6 product details popped up on Xbox Live Marketplace last night before being hastily pulled.

Six-player co-op, eight player multiplayer. Them's the details, if indeed the information wasn't posted in error. If that's campaign co-op, then we can wave goodbye to any kind of tension or genuine fear. Let's face it, having just one friend breathing in your ear during a horror game reduces the experience to a nonsense, so having five of the buggers giggling and snorting through the scary bits would be a total disaster.

But there is a lighter option here. We could well just be looking at a mammoth, six-player version of Resident Evil 4 and 5's arena-based Mercenaries mode in addition to the main campaign. The eight-player mode? Possibly even a team-based versus mode inspired by Left 4 Dead. Capcom is all about taking inspiration from western games these days, and a heroes vs. monsters side-game could be a rather storming fit for Resi.

In fact six-player Mercenaries does sound rather more likely than six-player campaign co-op. We've seen multiple potential protagonists in the trailer so far, but their footage seems to put them in settings (and possibly even play-styles) too disparate to indicate a single shared plot-line, surely? Whaddayareckon?