Howdy Builders,
We want to clarify the multiplayer situation a bit, as it’s apparent that our messaging wasn’t too clear in the previous article. In light of this, we planned another multiplayer beta test in June.
First, we didn’t arrive at the decision to take out the old story mode in a vacuum. We took into consideration player feedback, player expectations, internal feedback, and development schedule when we arrived at the conclusion. Below, we’ll go through each category in more detail.
But let us answer one question first. Why didn’t we just develop it as a co-op mode of the single player story from the start? Well, multiplayer didn’t start development until we’re two years into single player’s development, so from the start of development the code base was not optimized for multiplayer. Here, our somewhat inexperienced multiplayer team made an informed “mistake,” they took a look at the single player code and decided that the logic, especially around story and NPC interactions was too complicated to replicate in multiplayer unless we pretty much remade the game. Of course, internally, we also asked “Stardew Valley did it, why can’t we?” In the end, we decided since our team wasn’t sure that we can pull it off in the schedule we were tracking, it’s better to err on the side of caution for our first effort. Thus, the decision was made to make multiplayer its own thing, literally developed as a separate game with a separate code base with its own gameplay.
Now, development was proceeding. We did several beta tests, and in those tests, we presented a version of multiplayer that told a somewhat compressed historical story of Sandrock. It contained characters from across 70 years of that history. But since we wanted to let players date known single player characters as well as historical ones, the timeline became very convoluted. Some players hated it, some players were okay with it, but most agreed that it could’ve been better. Other player feedback included not liking the way we focused all the gameplay on the Commission Guild; not liking that when there was a story, it was skin deep; as well as the general linearity of it all. Basically, the design had issues.
As the months went by, there was a lot of pressure building on us to deliver the EA version of multiplayer. From the open beta tests, we realized the direction we were going in just wasn’t meeting expectations and ran a high risk of not being completed by the launch of the game. The game design didn’t really offer any replay value and we had a hard time maintaining the same quality of story as single player. It became obvious that for what we set out to do, a unique multiplayer story that lasts 30 hours, we weren’t capable of inputting the necessary resources to make it happen in time. We needed to find a gameplay loop that players will like and replay and be able to do it by later this year. We made a hard decision.
The good news is that we are retaining all the systems. You might not know this, but our multiplayer systems are more akin to an MMO, where players can play together and have their own inventory and interactions in an always live server. It’s pretty much the most complicated you’ll see out of our genre. The multiplayer team worked very hard over the last couple of years on these. So going forward, it’s more of a rearranging of all the systems that we have to attain a more fun game.
And it will be a more fun game. The gameplay loop is now revolved around 4 players building up the town of Sandrock through all means necessary in a more sandbox type of gameplay. You’ll gain points whether you’re building, or fighting, or dating, or even playing mahjong. And all the points will help with leveling up and opening more gameplay options. Building houses and completing tasks will also allow new NPCs to move into town. We’ve even added dynamic leveling so that single players can also play this smoothly. We feel this is actually in line with most of the feedback we got during the betas. This is the version you’ll see in the next beta test coming soon and the version we’re aiming to complete for the final release. As for the historic story and old characters, such as Howlett and Email, we’ll probably explore options to somehow tell players that story later on.
In conclusion, we know a lot of you are disappointed with how long it’s taking for us to put out the multiplayer version, and we’re right there with you. We do apologize for that. We could’ve done better in a lot of the things. Going back to an earlier point, in retrospect, based on our knowhow now, we probably should have just bitten the bullet and built multiplayer in the same code base as the single player and went for coop single player from the start. We would have succeeded as well. But we must live with our decisions and do the best with what we have. All the components are there though, so who’s to say we don’t come back to that later down the road?
Sincerely,
Pathea
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