How's multiplayer ?

[Jonathan]

Did the demo.
Was fun. Thinking of buying it.

How is multiplayer ?
How's the loot system ? Are each player "fighting" for gems ?
Are upgrades bough for everyone, or just "yourself" ?
(so in the end, is the "better" player gonna get all the gems and so, all the upgrades... or is the system forcing a "share" ?)
Are the rules different between "local" and "Online" ?
(I'm considering this game to play online with coworkers and/or with my nephew localy)

Are all players "locked" to 1 screen, or can we spread ? (local and/or online)

I read comments about is being beggy..... how bad is it ?
It is the same "local" and "online" ?

[DALCOhstangultion]

We bought this to play online co-op. It's... ok. It's fun to play, but, even though the Store page pushes its multiplayer capabilities, it just feels like co-op was added as an afterthought.

Technically, one of the biggest issues is that quite often the game will de-sync what each player sees: some players will see a living enemy, for others, it won't exist. We just finished a dungeon crawl and one of our players couldn't see any vases: he'd see any gems or snakes that came out of them when we broke them, but he couldn't see the actual source vases. There's also a problem with internet stability and presence in the game. It looks like a player can only enter the game at the start from the lobby. So, if their internet goes down even for an instant, when it comes back up, they've been kicked from the game and can't re-enter. The host has to save and quit and then re-invite everyone.

At the gameplay level, it also has issues:

- The top-down view is the first thing that springs to mind. If it were first person, everyone could wander to their heart's content. But, top-down restricts the scope of wandering. As you move farther and farther apart, the screen zooms out so the game can attempt to fit everyone in. At some point, you won't be able to see everyone, the game won't let you move apart any more, and you'll have to blindly move towards each other until everyone's visible.
- On a related note, if you change rooms or areas, the whole team gets dragged over to it. In one case, one of our members fell into the ocean where there was no way to return to land. It also happened to be right at a transition zone between areas. So, the rest of us got dragged in as she changed areas and we all swam around until we died.
- In dungeons, if someone dies, the other team members can carry their bones to a resurrection statue to be resuscitated. But, if you're wandering the wilderness and someone dies, there's a problem. If you're near a transporter, you can transport someplace and the person will be revived. But, if you're not, there's no place to take their bones to be resurrected. The team has to choose whether they should trek back to town (or the nearest transporter (or even abandon the run)), or leave that person as a ghost as they continue playing. They really need a Cleric type of class (or just a healing/resurrect) spell in the game.
- Menus are literal game stoppers. If anyone enters any kind of menu (even inventory), gameplay pauses and the other players are presented with a black screen saying someone's entered a menu. You can look at the menus, yourself, but as far as idling away in the game as someone looks at their inventory, nope. This really puts a damper on things as no one wants to look at a map, their inventory, their equipment, the Bestiary, or anything else because everyone else gets stopped in their tracks while they do so.
- Similarly, if someone talks to an NPC, everything else gets interrupted to watch the dialog go by. So, anyone trying to buy anything from a shopkeeper gets kicked out of that function if someone accidentaly talks to the shopkeeper.
- The dungeons are usually pretty good about adjusting blocking elements to match how many people are in the party. But, I've been solo in a couple of dungeons where it looks like it assumed I was in a party (so I couldn't finish a puzzle).
- The loot system varies. Health, gold and gems seem to get distributed across everyone equally (i.e., no one can "hog" everything). But, magic and other items seem to go to whoever picks them up. Usually, it works well. But, sometimes you wonder who's going to get what. For instance, we're actually unsure if things like "x% increase in tool use" (or something like that) applies to the person who opened the chest or to everyone in the party.
- Everyone buys their own upgrades. After leaving dungeons, you need to go to individual shopkeepers as a team and each person will talk to the shopkeeper to buy whatever they want for themselves with their own pool of gems (or picked up items (like mushrooms, acorns, spikes, etc.).
- The rules seem to be identical between solo and co-op play, but the UI changes. I guess it has to since in multiplayer, each player's UI gets put in their own corner of the screen and they can see the other players' stuff in the other corners. In solo, that information is in a different location. We haven't played local co-op, so I don't know if there's a difference.

We just finished the 3rd dungeon (I think there are four). And, even at this point, I'm not sure how I'll rate the game. If I really liked the genre, I'd probably say living with the issues was worth it just for the co-op experience. But, given my druthers, I'd prefer the game to be first person instead of top-down as that would solve many (and most likely the most irritating) problems. But, at that point, it'd be something like Borderlands instead of something like Zelda. So, at a casual level, if you like the genre and can find the game on sale (it looks like the current low price was $13.39), I guess it'll be fine.

[Jonathan]

Interresting.
So....... I probably won't insist to drag my collegues in (which would be online play).
But probably worth a shot in local multiplayer with my nephew, where many of the isssues will be avoided.... hopefully....

Thanks.

[Heliocentric Studios]

Thanks for the detailed answer DALCOhstangultion to Jonathans question. Local co-op works the same way as far as UI hud go with the exception of multiple people being able to use some menus at the same time.

Sorry to hear you're having desync issues, we've worked hard on those since launch to try to iron them out. When the objects become desychronized to the point that some players aren't seeing the same objects spawn it's better to remake the session as the object pool has become a bit corrupted at that point.

We're working on a better solution for enemy desync that checks for state disagreement and corrects the issue for the next patch.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the game! Let me know if you have any more specific issues. Since we've tackled a good amount of desync from launch it helps to hear in more detail the remaining issues so we know where we need to focus our fixes. :)