Army of Two region lockout explained

Not long after its release, it was discovered that Army of Two featured a regional lockout that prevented from playing with other parts of the world. In other words, players in North America, Europe, and Asia, have to be content to play with themselves. Hard-nosed problem solvers that they are, the fine folks at Joystiq got to the bottom of the issue by sticking the question to EA directly. The response from Reid Schneider, senior producer of Army of Two: the regional lockout was implemented to prevent slow connections. It seems that Army of Two requires comparable connection speeds from all users in order to properly sync up gameplay animations. As a result, someone with a slow connection can "bring down" the rest of a group, causing less than desirable play. Thus, the lockout was born. In an interesting note, the Asian version of the game is region locked for an entirely different reason: it doesn't allow players to shoot corpses. Attempting to make this feature compatible with the other versions over over Xbox Live caused the game to "fail."

So there you have it. There is a dim glow of hope at the end of the tunnel though, as EA is "actively looking into" finding a way to allow cross regional play while still eliminating slow connections.