My friend and I recently finished the full story in coop and I wanted to share some thoughts about my experience.
First off, playing together was incredibly easy. I have played quite a bit of single player before, but playing multiplayer actually just felt the same, which is a good thing in this case. I just press continue and I’m off. It’s so seamless and effortless and that just adds to the fun I think.
Second, it’s fun. Like a lot of fun. I have so many clips and screenshots of dumb stuff that we did, weird physics that we encountered and many, many deaths by fall damage. I was kinda worried that multiplayer would be serious and dark because of the tone of the game, but that was not the case at all. We just had a good time.
Another thing I really enjoyed was the fact that we could play separately. If there was a daily bounty and I wasn’t able to get on that day, my friend would hop on and keep me up to date about the progress and the rewards. It added another layer to the multiplayer experience that you don’t get that often in these types of games.
Then combat. Combat is a lot of fun in multiplayer. We naturally drifted to a composition of one melee and one ranged character, which worked out really well. Friendly fire damage is a good thing in my opinion because we have to communicate about our moves. I couldn’t just cast Armageddon on all the enemies when my friend was near. It created a really fun dynamic.
Now the bad. We did encounter a few issues while playing. Nothing so major as to stop us from playing, but still big enough to break immersion and cause frustration. The biggest issue for me was movement gliding. When I stopped sprinting, my character would continue to run and sort of “glide” in the same direction that I was running. Often causing me to jump of cliffs or fail difficult parkour sections. This was a big issue in the Balak Taw section of the game as you can probably imagine. I tried different network settings but that seemed to have no noticeable effect on the movement.
Another issue that mainly my friend encountered was that in some cases the attack animations didn’t go through. So for example when a AOE spell was cast by an enemy, my friend couldn’t see the AOE spell, to where he would take damage with no visual indicator of there actually being something that could cause damage. I personally had some instances where I would take damage but no attack animation was being played, although this did not happen often.
In summary, there are a few issues regarding the networking part of multiplayer but those couldn’t stop us from having a lot of fun. Thanks to all of the people at Moon Studios for their hard work on the game, so we can enjoy something truly special. I’m really looking forward to the official launch of the Together update so my friend and I can do this all again!