Coop Mode?

[Valenwe]

Hello everyone!

I don't know if this subject has been posted lastly, and I am sorry if so...

But is a coop mode possible? I know it would be alot of work, but if this mode is planned for later, this would be awesome.

[Guest jeffpeng]

16 minutes ago, Valenwe said:

Hello everyone!

Hello, and welcome to the Forums.

16 minutes ago, Valenwe said:

don't know if this subject has been posted lastly,

It comes up once in a while.

16 minutes ago, Valenwe said:

I am sorry if so...

Don't be.

16 minutes ago, Valenwe said:

But is a coop mode possible?

Without going into the nitty and gritty why not: no it's not.

16 minutes ago, Valenwe said:

if this mode is planned for later, this would be awesome.

It isn't. It never was on any roadmap, is outspokenly not in the developer's interest, and it is very unlikely that this is going to change.

One game I personally enjoyed (even if not as much as The Long Dark) that is getting a coop mode Soon™ is Green Hell. It's a survival game with some elements you find in The Long Dark, but overall a very different experience. It's on sale sometimes for under 10 bucks, and if you are into survival games I recommend checking it out for when you need a break from the frozen wastes.

Edited January 15, 2020 by jeffpeng

[Valenwe]

Alright, thanks for this complete answer to my topic  also thank you for the mention of that game, I will check it out!

 

[wizard03]

On 1/15/2020 at 5:19 AM, Valenwe said:

Hello everyone! I don't know if this subject has been posted lastly, and I am sorry if so...But is a coop mode possible? I know it would be alot of work, but if this mode is planned for later, this would be awesome.

Honestly, it would be a bit of a perk for this game if they offered the ability to allow people to interact with one another. But alas, probably not going to happen as multiplayer games require quite a bit of work to be done to the game itself before you even consider the servers to host the game.

[HoneyedFawn]

Same wish! Also wishing the wishlist would have all posts regarding the same wish combined and move the wish up the list by count or vote. 

[ManicManiac]

On ‎1‎/‎18‎/‎2020 at 7:22 AM, wizard03 said:

it would be a bit of a perk for this game if they offered the ability to allow people to interact with one another.

I think that would completely undermine the point of the game (the survival sandbox I mean - as that's what most are referring to when they raise this topic).

On another note, coop/multiplayer is usually a no go when there are mechanics in a game that utilize "time compression."

Edited January 31, 2020 by ManicManiac

[Themadlad94]

I mean, it might work if you do a split-screen co-op on the same monitor or TV screen. Another survival game called “Stranded Deep” did this and I think it would be a pretty cool idea

[wizard03]

Honestly I think it could be possible. Im not saying they need to go fallout 76 or anything, just the ability to invite and host other players to your own game at its current time frame.
I mean most of the time there is double the amount of neccisary items and whatnot. The only things that I could see a problem with is when the bear or moose pins someone down. That whole animation sequence would be lost as the second player could just shoot wildly as the first person gets mauled.

[Jimmy]

Let's examine this idea.

Say you want to harvest a deer hide.

The action to harvest the hide takes 40 minutes of in-game time by hand.

Your friend, also on the same map, is currently being pursued by a wolf.

So you, stuck in the harvest screen, must wait over 3 minutes of real time, watching a status bar slowly fill, while your friend plays dodge-the-wolf.

How about instead, you want to sleep for 12 in-game hours after doing some mountaineering, but your friend is fully rested? Care to watch a black screen for a full hour in real-time?

Want to craft something at a workbench? Better hope your friend isn't planning to go exploring.

Want to go fishing? Let's hope your friend isn't chasing rabbits.

Multiplayer is simply not feasible with the current game design. The core mechanic of time dilation prevents any reasonable attempt at multiple players existing in the one game.

[ajb1978]

8 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

The core mechanic of time dilation prevents any reasonable attempt at multiple players existing in the one game.

Pretty much came here to say this.

[acada]

The time dilatation for crafting and harvesting can be coped with. But I am afraid it would have to be like in favor of uncompressed game time. I mean if somebody decided to craft Deerskin Pants, it would mean 1 hour of real time. So the crafting person would stare 1 hour on the crafting window. Of course nobody craft this in one go. But 1 hour increment is like 5 minutes in front of not moving monitor. Even chopping cedar would be like 2,5 - 3 minutes. Animations could be done on the crafting/harvesting player monitor. Something like the character is looking around.

The real problem is sleeping time. It has to be done each day and it is 8-10 hours of game time which means about 45-55 minutes real time. Plus the fact character wakes up after sleep and if player is not present in front of monitor, character starts to get thirsty.... The only solution which comes to my mind is: When one player is going to sleep, the game saves his status and logs him off from the server. And he will not be able to log in for next 45-60 minutes depends on the sleep time selected.

These are IMHO deal breaker.

[Messsk]

If they limited it to 2 player co-op (which in my opinion would make a great game even better) this is totally possible.

There are other co-op games that deal with time de-sync, so Hinterland wouldn't be inventing anything new here just updating their own code to modify stat decay.

The concept is very simple. The player crafting or sleeping or whatever doesn't scale the time in the game. What scales is their rate of decay. If they craft something, or sleep, their stats decay / increase at an accelerated rate and the game doesn't scale for the other player. 

What wouldn't be possible is for one player to "sleep through the night" while the other player explores, because the in-game clock wouldn't scale. Unless both players are sleeping at the same time, in which case the game does scale the in-game clock, and catches up on any de-sync that may have occurred (such as two players going to sleep at different times). Players would likely fall into this pattern anyways since it makes more sense to have both players awake and sleeping in sync.
 

The game seamlessly alternates between scaling stat decay (when only one player is in a time-dilation action), and clock scaling (when both players are in time-dilation actions)

Edited May 29, 2020 by Messsk

[ErPanfi]

Jumping in to share a concept I'm toying with, that can "attenuate" the time compression issue, but it's only usable when players are in different regions : "time debt".  Let's say you sleep 8hrs in ML, while I'm in CH: you region "shift" 8hrs forward in time, mine stays at T+0, so I'm "in debt" by 8hrs. Then you sleep, and also gain 8hrs of debt : this means we are synced again, and both debts cancel each other.
 

When the player with more debt changes region some of this debt is forcefully repayed. Eg: if you're 10hrs behind transitioning from ML to Ravine will take 2hrs of your debt, with a prompt on screen that says something like "the trek to Ravine seems sligthly/moderately/extrememly difficult than usual. You should rest before trying it", and if you confirm you find yourself in Ravine with some added time and less calory/water, with the same consumption rate as sleeping. This means that the more "active" player is "dragged down"  toward the more "slow" player, and there will be less needing for time compression with every region switch.
This also means that asyncronous play is enabled: if the game forces you to go to sleep when you want to log off, your character is sleeping while you sleep IRL; this way I can play in our sandbox, recoup my time debt and catch up, and then I go to sleep and YOU play and catch up, and so on.
 

When the player enter the same region of the other, you can offset all the entire days of debt and forcefully sync them together. (ie: if you have 32hrs of debt you'll be forwarded by 8hrs, and the rest is condoned. You effectively gained one or more days of playtime in respect to the other player, but the game is about to end anyway, so who cares?).

 

Obviously, when players are in the same region "classical" time compression has to be used, but this technique can be used to avoid it when players are interacting with different maps.

In my head this concept suits well when every player has the unique task of find the other character (every one choose to interpret will/astrid, and the other player will *looks like* the other character in the player monitor), and the game ends well when anybody finds the other, sleeping or awake. Cue sweet cutscene.
 

To put some extra challenge, if you accumulate too much debt (like, idk, an entire week?) the slower player will die of <something> during his/her sleep.

The living player should be notified about this, and can choose if:

- keep playing on that sandbox until he found the corpse (corpse and spray markers stays), cue sad cutscene, then he can only play single player in that sandbox from now on.

- allow another players to join: corpse and every spray marker made by the dead player de-spawn when the other player joins, time debt is reset. This is actually a fresh game, when one of the two players had an advantage (disclaimer: I don't know if this choice leads to actually fun gameplay, but I think that the "find each other" is a difficult task, and finding many dead partners can be frustrating in the long run, so let's offer the player some extra happiness chance, if he likes it he will take it 😛 ).

 

 

EDIT: maybe this thread should have a "suggestion" flair on it: it's starting to have more contributions than questions

Edited June 2, 2020 by ErPanfi

[Dragonfall17]

co-op should be in another game if their's another game

 

[Jekku]

I'm really on the fence about this.

on the one hand, I think it would be awesome to play with people you know.

On the other hand... I just think the experience is perfect for a solo player. There's just something about being alone and "stuck" by yourself that's kind of... nice? It really adds to the experience. I think you would lose something if you added co-op to survival mode.

My two cents.

[ErPanfi]

1 hour ago, Jekku said:

On the other hand... I just think the experience is perfect for a solo player. There's just something about being alone and "stuck" by yourself that's kind of... nice? It really adds to the experience. I think you would lose something if you added co-op to survival mode.

I fully agree with you: the single-player portion of the experience is a key part in this game fun factor: there's Green Hell for survival coop.

BUT

That's why I proposed a "let's find each other" mechanic, a couple of post up here, while I were discussing the "time debt" concept: the moment you can interact with each other is the moment the game will end. It's *almost* a single player experience, except you have a shorter goal than survival and charting.

The loneliness is still there, however you *know* that you can beat it by trying to track a moving target, which you can witness interactions with the map instead of "cooperating" for survival.

What do you think?