Hi everyone !
In today’s devblog, we are going to talk about one of our most awaited feature: multiplayer and the play online mode. A lot of work have been done in the past few months on the network side of Wolcen and we are now ready to give you an overview of what we have today, some of the features that are currently being worked on and what you can expect to see released in the upcoming months.
In the upcoming weeks, we will be releasing what we call the “Play Online mode” on the beta branch. In this mode, you will have the same experience as when you were playing offline but your save files will be stored on our server to avoid cheating and you will have access to online-exclusive features ! Just to be clear, we are not talking about coop here!
Introducing the Daily Dungeon
The Daily Dungeon is a feature that will only be available in the play online mode and that could be summed up as “Randomly generated dungeon with a speedrun twist”.
Everyday, a randomly generated dungeon will be available to all players. This generated dungeon will be different from the random dungeon you have access through the bounty NPC and will be the same for every players.
Your goal is to find the boss room and exit of the dungeon as fast as possible while crushing everything in your way. Your performance will be scored by a combination of time and monster killed and displayed in a leaderboard. At the end of the day, the player with the best score will receive a special reward.
We think daily dungeons offer a new and interesting way to play Wolcen mixing grinding, speedrun and indirect player vs. player.
We cannot wait to hear your feedbacks regarding the Daily Dungeon and see what crazy builds you come up with.
Multiplayer
Now… onto the question on everyone’s lips : where is co-op multiplayer ?
So there is no misunderstanding: the play online mode, isn’t co-op multiplayer. You won’t be able to play with your friends with its release.
Unfortunately, multiplayer isn’t ready yet. However, the play online mode is the first step on the long road toward playing in the same game with your friends.
Before we can allow multiple players to join the same game, we have to develop a number of networking systems that will synchronise the player’s data. To do that, those data have to be stored on our servers so we can send to you, for example, the characters of the friends you are playing with.
This is what the Play Online mode is all about : lay the foundations on which the multiplayer but also all our online ecosystem will be built on.
This game mode is opening a lot of opportunity for us to make new features like the daily dungeon we mentioned above. It will also allow us to start implementing technical features invisible for our players like telemetry so we can have statistics about the game, the skills and builds you are using and a lot of various data we will be using for balancing.
What’s next ?
In the upcoming months, we will be working on improving server performances, fixing network related bugs, scaling up our networking infrastructure to support more concurrent players and developing all the systems required for multiplayer.
Of course, we will still be working on improving the game in general, adding content and new features to keep you guys busy ;)
Here is an incomplete, non exhaustive, in no particular order list of the things you will be seing added to the games in the next months :
- A brand new quest system with a new UI that will allow us to start implementing the first act of the game and introduce in-game cinematics
- New sections of the passive skill tree
- New skills in the active skill tree
- New ennemis, boss and AI behaviors
- New weapons, armors and items
- And much more…
sneak peak of the work in progress new main menu
These upcoming gameplay features will be showcased in more detail in their own devblogs.
Thank you all for your continuous support.
Cheers !