Survival Online multiplayer/co-op

[Kubisie 6]

I love The long Dark and have played it in its early stages. One thing I have always wanted to see was an online Multiplayer/Co-op survival mode. I feel it would be fun to survive with friends in the hard winter land. I know this could be long shot for the game, but I feel this would make the game a lot more fun and exciting, as playing with friend always dose that. This could also bring more people to play the game as you could play and interact with your friends. Let me know what you think of this idea. 

[Guest kristaok]

I could do without it, plus it won’t ever happen anyway. 

[Lonelyloper]

I love the game the way it is, but it would still be cool as an option. I can imagine spawning in with a friend, both on different maps and meeting up somewhere to help each other survive. It would give TLD a new spin.

But like @kristaok  said, I can't ever see it happening in this game.

[Mixxut]

I can see the fun in multiplayer but it's not going to happen and Hinterlnad has been really clear with that. It just doesn't fit in this game

[Guest jeffpeng]

Doesn't make sense on so many levels. The required balancing would be humongous. Plus yeah, not gonna happen. And it's good it isn't.

[Dan_]

It sure would be fun, although I can't see it happening in the vanilla game. Too many time accelerated activities to redo and rebalance unfortunately, imagine you're forging a hatchet but your survivor friend is travelling or escaping wolves, you'd be stuck for five in game hours until your friend can manage to accelerate the time too. ( ~12IRL min per in game hour ). It would demand coordination and teamwork even when you're separated. That said, I'm never shutting down this idea, there is plenty of intelligent and passionate people on the community who could make this happen in the future and it sure would be awesome to bring someone who isn't very skilled in the game, so you can teach them the long dark ways of wolf dodging and mountaingoating. 

This is one of the reasons that modding support will make this game live much much longer, I can't wait for a co-op mod. 

[DarKube]

This idea change the game completely ! it would be hard to set up !

[Wisdoom]

I think it would be awesome. I would limit that 2 or 3 people per game and maybe having some challenges that can only be accomplished by 2 people!

[stratvox]

I think it would be awesome too, but I suspect it would require a major major reworking of the game's internals to support multiple players. I think it's far more likely you'll see this in "TLD 2: The Darkening". Could be in the same world; ISTR Raph mentioning that they'd be able to do no loading screens for interiors with some of the new (IIRC) "streaming" technology in later versions of Unity in some post or other, probably in a Milton Mailbag.

Personally, if I were to spitball all this, I'd consider four players in the world of Great Bear Island to be a good number for multi-player; it's low enough that finding other players would be challenging. I can also think of a few interesting game modes for a MP game... game ends when the first person dies (so help your fellow players out!), last player standing, or even a long term game where a new player crashes their plane into the map when another player dies, keeping the number of players at four as long as new players are willing to join that particular game instance.

And yes, having game tasks that require player cooperation to complete would add a lot to gameplay. Got to be said though... doing that effectively would be a big big job and it sure isn't gonna happen tomorrow, or even in 2019. Just separating out game state from player action to enable a client-server model alone is going to be a big job. I'm hoping that now that Redux is done they'll be able to move quickly on creating the remaining three episodes and have them completed by the end of 2019 (oh, and more regions please! Please! Pleeease!), with maybe TLD 2 happening in 2020.

I understand the game continues to sell well, so at least it's likely that the resources will be available to help make this happen moving forward. The new hires from Capcom mentioned a month or so back gives me hope that this is in the long term roadmap for the firm.

[Guest jeffpeng]

I don't really want to go into how much of TLD's core concepts and mechanics do work rather poorly in an MP setting, but there is much more than just the obvious time-lapse mechanic. The only thing I could somewhat see working is a coop LAN-like setting, meaning direct cooperation, not coexisting peacefully in the same world. I don't dispute this would be fun. In the contrary: I would actually see really big potential in that. But then it's a different game to do that in, even if it might very much try and carry the spirit of TLD or even play in the same universe.

I've been coauthoring a rather complex Minecraft Modpack (and even writing a Mod engine for that) and it was set around a rather long, hard and steep survival and later tech progression tree, including sleep and time lapse mechanics and "global" events, plus I was even working on a story mode. Balancing this against more than one player was sheer hell and probably one of the reasons the modpack never really took off, even if it sounded and felt like an amazing idea at first.

What I am saying: there is a reason multiplayer modes rarely exist for single player games with complex mechanics, and if they do it's usually done adapting a MP game for SP use, and not the other way around. Just think about how great it sounded to play Skyrim in MP and then it really wasn't. And TLD is so much single player at its heart I don't see it in any other setting that involves a fixed amount of players per game that actually work together like you used to playing LAN games back in the day. But if you combine that with permadeath one dead player means the entire party is busted - which just multiplies frustration. In an open world with PUG's or even just players joining and leaving? No freaking way.