What does it mean for a game to be multiplayer? Well, it needs to allow more than one player to interact with the world. But when we say or think "I wish Stardew Valley had multiplayer support", it might be easy to fail to consider the multiple ways that this could be implemented. Co-operative style gameplay would be the simplest to implement. Two to maybe four players get together and start playing through what is currently the solo campaign, dividing labor and being able to accomplish greater feats than any farmer could do just on their own. This raises at least a few questions about balance, relationships, and sleep, and maybe a couple of other things, but such questions all have simple answers. The other kind of multiplayer I would love to see in this game's future is an implementation with a persistent world. This sort of implementation would be designed for a larger player base. Players could log on and off at their leisure, and even if they’re not online the world will continue to interact without them. This approach raises a LOT of questions with a plethora of different ways they could be approached. How does sleep work? If each player has their own farm, where does it get placed on the world? How will time-passage be handled – if time is always passing are multiple seasons or even years going to have passed every time a player logs in? Imagine the foliage! And how can a player even hope to keep up crops in that situation? I could really go on. But what it boils down to is the necessity for a total overhaul to allow this sort of gameplay, and I don’t know if it will ever actually be in the cards for this game’s future, but I really want it to be. I’d like the posts on this thread to be discussion on either multiplayer implementation. Identify a problem with either and speculate on what could be changed to make it work. I intend to contribute to the discussion a bit later on, maybe discussing some of the problems I’ve mentioned above and some new ones. As a final note to the developer, while it’s fun to speculate on how a perfectly polished multiplayer implementation would work, it doesn’t need to be perfect in the initial implementation. We as a modding community would get a TON of mileage out of just basic multiplayer support while the official implementation is being polished and balanced. So that’s really something I hope we get to see this year. Thanks for the great game!
I was thinking about this yesterday. I wonder how multiplayer will even pan out. Especially with this games mechanics and story.
I don't think a persistent world is feasible for this style of game. Like you said, seasons and years could pass between logging off and logging in making one players interaction with the world fleeting and insignificant. Changing the time scale would only serve to make the game even more broken because if you combine 10+ people with 10x as much time you'll just be seeing farms completely filled within in-game days.
Yeah I've been wondering this. Unless players are logged in at the same time or hotseating I can't see away around working on the same farm. Perhaps you could visit another person's farm and leave items or gifts, or leave messages/notices asking for or offering to buy items.
Personally I would happily sacrifice co-op for content updates, but that's just my reclusive perspective.
Would be nice if you raised the mailbox flap if you wanted to receive mails from online visitors, and put it down if you don't want to
I think it's going to work like Terraria and Starbound, people can set up servers and stuff and just go into the same world as the owner but for all intents and purposes you're a visitor in the owner's world.
There is a lot you can do with this but the simpliest way is people who join your game have NO say over sleeping, the host of the game goes to bed - Everyone sleeps, you all wake up together in the same bed, you are a guest, if the host sleeps, then tough, so do you. Terrarias idea was good for multiplayer, you only took with you whats in your character backpacks, anyone whos played terraria knows all about this stuff, but the moment you allow this, you suddenly have an infinite amount of gold at your disposal because of the way the game saves - you log into someones game, you harvest or get given all the crops - the host turns his game off without saving, reload all the crops are back, voila! you just duplicated your crops. the easiest way around that is, you cannot play a multiplayer game using a simpleplayer character, you need to make a seperate save/new character, and declare that as multiplayer, your singleplayer character and save is then not effected by online play. Limited Trade: - the ONLY way people can get crops/produce from you? they have to purchase it through your shop, either at the farm, or a shop you buy and setup intown etc the crops default value, one you cannot change to be lower is what the game sells it for when you put it into the delivery system, therefore setting crops to only 1g to try and get around this system is no longer broken ... the quitting without saving thing though is still going to happen .... The thing you need to realise is, the game is completely different when playing online with friends, i personally wouldn't mind it if the online aspect is limited ONLY to the farm or ONLY to the town which gives you access to the mine, if you set it up as Town only, you cannot accesss your farm and visa versa. I don't know how you could possibly add multiplayer to this game without instantly breaking it.
That's assuming you bring your character with you, Terraria is an exception really, most games simply have unique characters for every server and aren't worse games for that. Another possibility would simply be saving the game whenever a character logs off.
I assumed it would be old fashioned co-op. You start a new game, you choose how many players (up to four) and you then play the game together. Your characters are in the save file and do not go elsewhere. You only play when everyone is available and when you want to sleep you all go to bed. It would be the same game with the same world, the same story. You just play it with a few friends. It might be nice if the farm area was slightly larger and the costs of various things were adjusted slightly depending on how many players you chose to keep things balanced and keep you working together. It would also be nice if there were additional housing options so you could eventually all get your own rooms. However, it would be minor changes rather than large scale alterations.
What if trading items was like trading Pokemon? Auto-save occurs before and after the trade. Wouldn't that prevent duplication? I would very much like for an established trade NPC or machine to be in place to prevent scamming. Not just simple drop trades. That's just asking for trouble. Have it to where you can either sell the item for a set price or trade for a specific item and quantity you specify from a list. Maybe even set up shops this way. Also allow for items to be given away for free and for multiple trades to occur within one menu screen to expedite the auto-saving that will be taking place. As far as breaking game progression goes that just comes with the territory. I know some Terraria servers required you to start a new character as others have mentioned. The player bought it and it's their game. I don't see that as any reason to restrict trading for fear of breaking game progression. It would only make everyone else unhappy. Some people want to give things away to friends and I think that should be allowed.
I think a lot of people are expecting full on multiplayer, when actually, it's going to be co-op. I doubt you'll find dedicated public servers or the like, it'll most likely just be a locally hosted p2p style server or something. Essentially, I would expect it to play very similar to the base game, just with another person / people
perhaps ... the game auto saves when someone joins and leaves, so if someone does get your crops, then leaves, the game saves. and the only way they keep the crops is if they leave the game manually, if the hosts shutsdown before the other player leaves nothing is saved etc this should solve the duplicating crop issue from how the game default saves.
Though the easiest way would be to consider the players one person and one farm, that's the last thing I want out of Stardew multi. Even if we work on the same farm, I would like our characters to be different people who have different relationships with the townsfolk. Ideally, we could choose to manage different farms attached to the town Managing day and night wouldn't be terribly difficult; like MBvideo said, just leave that up to the host. If there is going to be any kind of persistence though, triggers for season changes and events would have to be change lest one player move the server to summer just as another is a day away from spring harvest. One way to handle things would be to allow a degree of asynchronous multiplayer with the game server keeping track of what one player does (not exact steps) when the others are not playing. When the player or players who are behind log in, they could be notified of where the other players are in the game. When they play that catch up time it would be as if the other player has already been out and about his business in town and on the farm. Should there be a time difference and they want to play true co-op the players who are behind would have to chose if they want to skip ahead.
What I've seen has indicated MP would be more along the lines of "Your friends can join and play around on your farm while you're playing" - meaning they could water your crops with their watering cans, til your soil, chop down trees, and so on - but that they may not be able to bring any of it away to their own farm. I kind of like the idea of being able to help each other out - ie, I come over to your farm and you let me take a furnace out of your chest, and I water your crops and feed your animals while you go play in the mines. But all of this requires trust on the part of the players, and keeping griefers away from our community. Sure, you could just not invite a griefer back - but the damage would be done, right? So how do we prevent that, without making it useless for those who want to help each other out? I think the solution would be a choice-to-save feature at the end of the day in MP. We play for a while. Let's say you come to my farm. You go romp around on the farm, feed the animals, til a bunch of land, chop a bunch of trees, and get a bunch of wood, seeds, and sap etc. You empty the milk from my cows into the shipping bin or my fridge (I'm saving it for pumpkin soup for my sweetie). At the end of the day, when I go to 'bed', I get a popup that says "This is what changed today. Do you want to save these changes to your farm?" Problem solved. It COULD lead to folks joining a farm and collecting a lot of random resources without spending the time on their own farm... but someone had to set that up in the first place, so it's not like it's a total mess. And if you don't save, the other person doesn't get the goods either, so it can't be exploited in that way. *shrug* Just a thought. I'm not a CS, so I can't speak to programmability or server-client matching, but it's an idea?
