What should Triarchy’s co-op player cap be?
We started by aiming to support 1 to 3 players. This already meant quite a lot of work, especially with game balance - Triarchy is quite different playing solo than playing in a duo or trio. Just modifying health or damage numbers doesn't give a good experience. So instead, we’ve given enemies and bosses new attack patterns, and sometimes even different additional mobs in fights. Which means you then have to separately test the solo vs duo vs trio experiences.
With larger player numbers, it's hard to balance the fight’s difficulty while keeping it fun. If playing with 5 people means a boss has 5x the hitpoints, it can feel really bad to hit a boss with your sword and barely see their health bar move. Even if that's the 'correct' mechanical balance.
And not everything in game balance has a linear relationship, which makes supporting such a wide amount of player numbers in a game like Triarchy even harder. Aggro from enemies and bosses is an interesting example. If an enemy is designed to attack only a single player at a time, then it becomes trivial in multiplayer to have one person kite it while the others dump damage.
Imagine how much bigger a 32-player boat would have to be.
If we build that bigger boat, and get it feeling great for 32 players - how will that boat feel with only 2 players on it? And if the boat grows, channels and islands and docks need to change to fit it. It's extremely hard to have something that neatly scales with player numbers. Most decisions around the player cap are like this - simple at first glance, but with cascading impacts that can easily compromise the vision for the game.
It also impacts how the UI's work, and performance for the host, as well as networking. Generally, as player numbers go up, performance goes down - in an escalating fashion.
But, clearly, some of you have a group of 4+ that want to play together. And picking who can't join sucks. So we've been asking ourselves:
Would raising the player cap still keep the vision for Triarchy intact?
Can we actually do it? (development time, and balance complexity)
And we think the answer is yes to both. So, we're going to try some things out.
We're still not sure if we will be able to get the balance precisely right for all group sizes. But, with the upcoming playtest we're aiming to raise the player cap to…
If any of you have larger groups that you'd like to play Triarchy with, we'd really appreciate any feedback on how this Alpha build plays with your larger group size.