The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners was originally going to include co-op
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution’s most-requested feature is a co-op mode. Initially, such an option was planned, but the developer had to scale it back.
“[This] will probably cause community uproar, but at one point we did experiment with multiplayer, but it just wasn't right for what the game we were building at the time,” Guy Costantini, VP of Global Interactive Marketing at Skydance tells GLHF during a GDC interview.
“It's definitely a highly requested feature to be able to put multiplayer in our game, and it's not off our radar, but it takes a lot of work to do that well, and so we will only ever do it if we can do it well. That was one of those things where it's hard enough to deliver a really compelling, deep story, so let's do that and let's try to do that well, and if we can do that well, then let's work on adding stuff onto it.
“It’s hard because the world state has to be exactly the same for both players, and you can move everything in this world by the way. You don’t want people to just overlap each other. What happens if they touch? You’ll notice that if you put your hand on the table in The Walking Dead, that your hand adapts to the table, it won’t just go through it. So imagine that but with a person that is moving, or you’re coordinating the two.
“Let’s say you’re [fighting] co-op against a zombie horde, not even PvP because that’s even more difficult, but co-op. There’s a lot of things that you need to keep in mind in order for the experience to feel good, and not janky. There's a lot of challenges, but it’s not impossible. It's just a matter of time and people.”
Of course, it’s always the players who decide whether a game is successful or not, whether the team includes its wanted features or not. With the success of Chapter 1, and the promising start to Chapter 2, we asked if Chapter 3 would be on its way. “Who knows right now,” Costantini says. “There's no public plans yet, but we are definitely looking at whether or not people are going to buy. If they want more, we're listening to them.”
