Updated on September 2017.
On Kickstarter we made a promise that stretch goals will be added as more funding is secured via Early Access. That still stands, with the exception of multiplayer, as adding multiplayer protocols to games is more complicated.
After taking every aspect of the game in consideration, adding multiplayer would currently be a matter of about half a year. We would need to rework everything, rewrite most of the code, figure out a million game design decisions, and take care of physics synchronization in MP games, basically halting any progress of the game itself.
The achievable end-result of multiplayer is of questionable quality at best, as we've seen with other games that are based upon voxel worlds and rely heavily on physics. We've seen the struggles of other multiplayer sandbox games with triple and more team sizes.
At this situation we cannot afford to lose half a year of development progress, with the only end goal being a bug-riddled multiplayer added to world that we want to expand so much. Therefore we had to bite down on the sour apple as we say in Czech and make a hard-line decision.
We would like to apologize to all our Kickstarter backers and preorder Nomads who only backed Planet Nomads in the hopes of having a multiplayer game to play.
Unforeseen changes happen in the game development, significant ones. It is a very uncertain industry, both for players like you and developers like us. We're sorry to have disappointed you in the question of multiplayer. We continue to work on Planet Nomads in the best way we can, with plenty of content coming in the months to come, and hope that you will find enjoyment in the upcoming new features that will be added to Planet Nomads to make it a quality and enjoyable experience.
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