Co-op was built and tested for two players on one machine. Your 3-player
sessions found everything that assumption broke, and then some. This update
rebuilds it.
New
- Squads of 3 and 4: co-op is no longer a two-player system with extra
seats. Everyone gets a body on everyone's screen, is hunted by the swarm, and
counts when the run ends. - Spectate your squad: when you go down you can now watch your
teammates and switch between them, instead of staring at your own corpse. - Coloured player halos: the grid lights up in each player's own
colour, so you can tell who is where at a glance across the arena. - Auto-start: no more LAUNCH button. Once everyone is ready, a 3-2-1
countdown runs and the match starts itself. Un-ready to cancel. - Replay vote: the end screen appears for the whole squad, and RETRY
is a vote. The run restarts once everyone is in. - Rescue gauge: when you are down you can see your revive filling up,
so you know someone is coming for you.
Balance
- Bosses scale with squad size: double health in duo, triple in trio,
quadruple in a full squad. A boss tuned for one player was melting in seconds
under three. Expect a real fight again. - Reviving is actually possible: the revive zone is more than twice as
wide and takes less time. At surf speed the old one was crossed in a tenth of a
second.
Improved
- One leaderboard for everyone: standings now come from Steam only. The
board used to mix in your own local history, which meant every player saw a
different ranking. Note: your run appears once Steam returns it, and only if it
beats your own record. - Teammate markers: larger, in the game's own typeface, one set per
teammate. Who is down, where they are, how far. - Joining a match: clients get a proper launch screen instead of being
dropped back on the main menu with no explanation, and the transition into the
arena is clean. - Leaving: one player returning to the menu no longer kicks the whole
squad out. The run continues.
Fixed
- Players could be invisible to each other, or stand frozen on a teammate's
screen while moving normally on their own. - Downed players left a ghost body behind, and the swarm kept attacking it
instead of turning on the living. - Enemies could spawn point-blank on a player the host was not tracking.
- Teammates' shots were invisible: the machine gun and precision rifle were
never sent over the network at all. - Your crosshair flashed hit markers for your teammate's shots.
- Enemies appeared to pop in and then teleport into place, and flashed white
before dying instead of just dying. - A teammate's rocket exploded with a completely different effect from your
own. Same blast for everyone now. - One player dying could end the run for everyone.
- Pausing did not reliably reach the whole squad, and the end screen's buttons
could stop responding entirely. - Leaderboard: duplicated scores, a single co-op run creating several entries,
and a rank on the end screen that did not match the board. - The game now mutes itself when you alt-tab.
Thanks to everyone who played through the broken version and told me exactly
what they saw. Half of these were found from your descriptions alone.
GL out there. Bring a friend. Or three.