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The core game was always designed completely around couch co-op. I feel couch co-op is dying and it makes me sad. Online multiplayer simply loses that ability to throat-slam your friend into the floor when they steal your perk.
That being said, I'd love to add online in the future, but the game right now simply wouldn't support it because it wasn't made for it in mind. It's a massive technical and time consuming task, especially for this game which has *a lot* of dynamic objects in the world (most things are physical objects that can move, explode, shatter etc.).
If we were to throw it in now, it would be a half-assed mess and I wouldn't do that.
For indies, it's much more common to have local coop only, as you avoid the nightmare of net code, which is a living hell to be properly implemented. So it's actually quite common, it's just something incredible rare in AAA titles. The massive studios really don't seem to give a ♥♥♥♥ about it, specially on PC.
But specially since last year, I've seen an increasing number of local multiplayer indies as a whole, even competitive! Most are labeled "party games", usually with a small scope, no story, just fun.
There're also some bigger devs like arrowhead studios which make great coop games, having support to both local and online coop and allowing them to be mixed freely. It's awesome!
Well, while you can't physically harm anyone like that, you can always curse them while typing, or even better with voice chat support.
Anyway, just making myself clear, I'm not requesting online coop, I'm somewhat aware of the challenge to implement it properly, specially for an indie studio!
And of course, adding online player AFTER development is even harder, having to rewrite the whole thing!
Could it be because it's usless for 90% of the population unless unemployed or not even adult (thus too young to even buy games)?
Did it occur to you that gaming has become an international and largely internet dependant market?
How many copies do you expect to sell via Steam, Microsoft store and so on compared to disc versions sold in local stores?
It couldn't be that you looked at statistics like these right?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physical-game-sales-in-the-us-since-2009/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267190/traffic-forecast-for-internet-gaming/
Well, I'd be interested to hear back from you in a year or so with news on:
A) how you plan to reverse the trend of couch co-op dying (and by that I mean not just games being released but them being played in couch co-op sessions)
B) how you'll reverse the trend of local gaming versus internet gaming
C) how you reverse the trend of even single player games dying, especially those (non AAA) with lackluster stories
Also almost every engine out there (Unity, Unreal, Cryengine, Lumbermill) have at least decent netcode out of the box. Just use ragdolling after the entity is dead and you can have that all clientside thus not affecting MP at all.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that online co-op means ADDITIONAL SALES while being played by the same number of players? In case you're interested in actually selling that is.
OK, so let's take every mention of us liking couch-co-op out of the picture...it still wouldn't have been possible. We're a tiny team, release our first big game ever, and doing it across multiple platforms. Adding multiplayer on to that, and making it actually work well would have cost more time and man-power than we could have achieved.
There are lots of small games that have made the same descision as us (focus on non-online play), for the same reasons. Tesla vs. Lovecraft is a very relevant example, and that is from 10 Tons, who have vastly more resources than us.
Finally, VALA is actually quite a hard game to make online. Your second last sentence about how easy multiplayer is makes you seem naive. If you've actually launched and supported an online game, I appologize, but either way that is how you come across.
VALA is quite complicated because we have a lot going on, and a lot needs to change to make stuff work nicely for online. It was never designed to support online, and as such retrofitting it is also particularly challenging.
Also syncing a few hundred llamas at a time is tough, so we need to rewrite the pathfinding to be deterministic probably, and make each client decide to make them do the same thing without requiring every frame to be synced.
Or maybe not - but our team has never done anything serious online, which is even more reason trying to support that at launch would have possibly wasted months/a year, actually probably a horrible business descision.
TL;DR: It is harder than you give it credit for, also we didn't have the time, know-how, or finances to make and support online at launch regardless of how much we wanted to.
That said what engine are you guys using? Most engines support this out of the box with amazing netcode. Implementing shooter mechanics including hitscanning thus tracing / raycasting for object detection is possible even using their scripting methods (like UEs blueprints) isn't hard to do within these engines at all. That even includes lag compensation.
But then again - it's not about it being harder, which it is not. It's about that design decision you made by building without replication in mind. And I agree. Probably too hard to re-do all of that work. So yeah, that part I understand. Maybe you'll build the next game with that in mind.
It sounds like you've watched some game engine marketing or made an online prototype (once again, if I'm wrong here I appologize but that is how it sounds) and assumed that is exactly how hard it'd be for a large game to add it, and also not taken into account things like actually paying to keep those services alive and being able to support those long term.
If we went back in time somehow and started from scratch I can almost guarantee we'd decide to not do online from the beginning again. It would basically mean that the game would literally never get released because we'd run out of money. If the choice is between getting a good finished game out or getting a broken multiplayer/game out because we literally could afford to really finish it, I'd pick the former every time.