Today we got the basics of networked "Parties" working, meaning putting a team together in a lobby and having that team stay together across missions. Character progression now works the same as it does in local co-op, but the characters themselves are unique to the party / lobby in question. Character upgrades are carried over between missions as long as the Party stays together, but the characters do not persist once the party / lobby disbands.
Playtesting this brought up a lot of ideas of some kind of Party Campaign. We're thinking that you could have a fixed sequence of maps to defeat, and need to keep chipping away at any given map with new recruits until you defeat that map. This would of course with in single play and local co-op as well.
Hardcore mode could be that your party is disbanded / the campaign is scrubbed if all team mates die, but as long as someone survives the campaign is still deemed viable, or something like that... :)
What that actually got us thinking about in general was reinforcements in all forms of co-op games. Our initial thoughts we're some kind of waves, where dead players could respawn as new recruits in the airlock at given time intervals. A better version (we think) would be having teleporter stations that only sometimes are available within a given mission, and you can interact with them to beam in reinforcements (dead players that respawn as new characters). This is in keeping with a lot of things that we have found to work best as fixed features of the map, like Sentries. Repair stations (to fix Electronics Damage) also follow this axiom.
In any case, we are looking at getting a new update out as soon as we can validate that the Party progression works properly as well as some more polish to the new shotgun class (which is a blast, pun or no!)
Networked Party Progression
Networked parties, lobbys, shotguns and respawns! Some of the things we are currently working on for the next early access update.
Posted by colourmad on
I Wish more people play this game.