I’m sure some people are sick of discussing MP and will tell me to just wait patiently for the devs to address it, in which case I suggest you simply move to another thread lol. I’m not here to deliberately stoke the flames, but this is something I’m really interested (and invested) in, and every day we don’t hear anything is another day my imagination wanders and wonders what is holding it up. Not necessarily an MP version, but even news about the progress/status/plans would be nice.
My memory isn’t great, but I’m almost 100% sure the first time I saw Path of Exile in closed beta nearly 10 years ago, it was already a multiplayer experience. I’m not saying it was “done” or perfect, but it was built into the game as part of the infrastructure, so straight up during beta we were all testing an MP version of the game. This was in 2011, and PoE didn’t officially release until another TWO YEARS later. That means that those devs built MP into the game from the getgo, and tested with it, but still needed 2 years to get the game to a release state. Keep in mind that LE was originally supposed to release THIS year, so even in a good case scenario, you’d think plans would have included MP testing starting last year…
This makes me very concerned about the development status of this game. Now perhaps these developers are far far superior to the PoE ones ( ), but it still begs the question if it makes sense to continue to do this much beta “testing” (and make broad, sweeping changes to the game, based on it) without the multiplayer infrastructure built into the engine.
I am not a programmer/developer by any means but I have played and tested enough games over the past 30 years to know that the kind of MP they talked about during Kickstarter permeates EVERY facet of the game, whether every player “cares” about it or not. Just by pure logic, it makes no sense to me to follow this path of spending months at a time patching a version of the game that is likely to need wholesale changes to the INFRASTRUCTURE once MP is implemented. It’s like re-modeling your kitchen over and over when the plumbing isn’t even complete.
At this point, I would honestly be OK with the devs saying that the full MP they had hoped to deliver is just out of scope so they decided to scale it down. Or if it’s destined to just be an SP game, just come out and say it. The longer it sits in the “unknown” the more that fans like me will conjecture on what is or is not going on.
It’s been such a crappy year, maybe I’m just prone to negative thinking, so here’s hoping I am 100% wrong and next year will bring us the true MP experience those of us who Kickstarted were originally promised.