I get it no Multiplayer, UGH BUT WHY?

[Brando]

Besides mod support it was the biggest complaint about BoneWorks. I'm astounded to learn BoneLab won't support it directly I'm still super stoked but man oh man, MP support even for just the arenas would have made this the most popular VR game ever made and for a long time.

[whomst]

An educated guess would put it somewhere between resource management and artistic vision. Having multiplayer would of course be great regardless of game design. Co-op campaign, multiplayer sandbox, etc. would be a ton of fun and it is a ton of fun with Boneworks mods. But ultimately I think there's probably a thought process the devs need to go through where they ask "what is this game going to be and what is the best way to deliver that experience?" The best multiplayer game is one built with multiplayer in mind. From a development point of view it might feel hard to deliver a worthy multiplayer experience on top of what is designed to be a singleplayer game and so as cool as it would be, maybe it just isn't that high on their wish list.

The other, more obvious issue, is that multiplayer is hard and this is a small dev team. There isn't just a button you can press in Unity to make a game like this multiplayer. You need physics interactions both in the world and in player bodies to be consistent across peers. You need netcode good enough to do that. You need to be confident your servers can handle the load. You need to make decisions about what interactions are possible and whether you can maintain the core design philosophy when doing so. Can people touch each other? In a game like this you'd think you want that to be possible, but because your body is an object that can be moved that might be a nightmare to balance. Can somebody hold you down? Pick you up by your ankles? If so, does the upright balancer disable to make it look less weird or does it remain so people aren't losing their lunch? It's a lot easier to manage and limit what's likely to happen to you in a singleplayer world.

Altogether Bonelab is shaping up to be a successor to Boneworks. The physics have been refined and there are additional systems in place to make more interactions possible (imagine trying to put a go cart in BW. wouldn't work). Mods are now officially supported in what looks similar to a GMod approach so far (maybe slightly more limited? we'll see). I think SLZ is continuing to build a base, learn how to make the best game, and use this to open more possibilities going forward. Meaning, in the future, if there's something they want to add multiplayer to it will be easier to tackle and put resources into making it work well.

[Iwen]

hopefully big brain makes multiplayer with mods somehow

[Brando]

Eh, all that is cool but it can be answered simply by looking at the multiplayer mods already developed in Boneworks. Create a hint of lore that player bodies aren't subject to the full physics of the virtual world and react the same way as they do when an NPC attacks them - aka staying upright and having your body moved around a bit but not completely separated by user control. Player bodies could basically be really 'heavy' so gravity weapons can't throw them across the map, only a few feet. Falling down is just a forced crouch, have the player put their hands down behind their rear end to simulate standing back up. The end.

I think for a small team who like to move project to project, leaving MP out is a way of being able to move past this project instead of having to maintain a long-term dev crew. Maybe there's a hedge in there somewhere to see how sales go and MP could be a future add-on.

To me though, this is a major oversight just given the ABSURD amounts of community requests that it needed to be added. Like, it's literally the main thing people wanted.

[whomst]

Originally posted by Brando:

Eh, all that is cool but it can be answered simply by looking at the multiplayer mods already developed in Boneworks. Create a hint of lore that player bodies aren't subject to the full physics of the virtual world and react the same way as they do when an NPC attacks them - aka staying upright and having your body moved around a bit but not completely separated by user control. Player bodies could basically be really 'heavy' so gravity weapons can't throw them across the map, only a few feet. Falling down is just a forced crouch, have the player put their hands down behind their rear end to simulate standing back up. The end.

I think for a small team who like to move project to project, leaving MP out is a way of being able to move past this project instead of having to maintain a long-term dev crew. Maybe there's a hedge in there somewhere to see how sales go and MP could be a future add-on.

To me though, this is a major oversight just given the ABSURD amounts of community requests that it needed to be added. Like, it's literally the main thing people wanted.

I agree with a lot of what you said but I think that's a slight oversimplification esp it comes to consequences in UX. Being able to be moved at all is something that could likely be abused. Can you still grab somebody's arm? If two bodies collide, they need to be equals, so could you keep somebody stuck in a corner regardless? Is there a limit to phys weapon use time? Cooldown? Maybe you can't yeet the player but can you keep them suspended? If the player escapes, can you just pick them up again immediately? The simpler answer would be to invalidate phys weapons on player bodies but I think that would cause complaints and go against the spirit of the game. Maybe make it a setting that you can turn on or off? But that inconsistency could be weird. And what would the implementation be for making the body heavy to phys weapons while simultaneously acting normal for other interactions? Seems like something that could cause bugs. You've probably seen how Boneworks physics can be abused. Why even bother with a forced crouch for falling down? That's not very immersive and it sounds janky to me. The hands behind butt could also be an issue for quest users since the cameras don't see behind you, so using the controller stick should work, but then it's just like a normal crouch position, which doesn't feel like a feature that should be implemented imo.

These aren't insurmountable issues. I think entanglement does do a really good job, and I don't see a community where rampant player abuse is a thing. So I'm definitely not saying multiplayer can't be done. But I am saying that from a dev perspective it's a lot different. These questions take time and a lot of testing. There are issues you can never see coming, and new issues caused by solutions to old ones. The game isn't even in a finalized state yet. Features and maps are still tbd to an extent. Multiplayer would likely need to be fleshed out after the single player experience is in a mostly static state, and that adds a lot of development time. And, like you said, maintenance after the fact. SLZ has a roadmap of games they need to make and fund the development of. If maintaining multiplayer takes too many resources that's going to harm their ability to be productive on new projects.

Then there's the issues from before of netcode, server load, etc.

I do believe not shipping with multiplayer is going to hurt the game. This is a huge release, polishing what Boneworks did and making it accessible for millions of Quest users. In a lot of ways it's looking like the first GMod VR. But GMod is so much better with friends, so being stuck in single player until a third party peer to peer mod is made months after release sucks. I don't blame the devs for it, but it sucks.

But hey, like I said in the original comment, part of the problem with mp here is that the game is designed for single player. That alone complicates the multiplayer aspect. Maybe it would be best to wait for a multiplayer centric title down the line