Multiplayer Preview: The Good, The Bad and The Unexpected

The last couple of months have been a veritable whirlwind. With the Multiplayer Preview in the books, we had a lot of data of all kinds to sift through — netcode, graphics and server performance, the works. That led to a lot of internal analysis and experimentation, the results of which we’re going to share with you today! Read on to find out what we learned from the Multiplayer Preview and how that will shape PlanetQuest going forward.

Multiplayer Preview Breakdown

At the time of writing, it has been a month since we had our Multiplayer Preview. The turnout was great, for which we are incredibly grateful to all of you who participated. Even our team members got in on the action! Lots of PQ devs joined to shoot our fans in the face and get shot in the face in turn. One of our most infamous users — QuestLog — even attempted to break the kill record. With his over 700(!) sessions in the single player preview to hone his skill, perhaps we should include a special handicap for him next time…

All in all, it has been a very interesting chapter in the ongoing development of our game. Between the hundreds of games played and tens of thousands of confirmed kills, not only did we collect some vital data, but you guys left some pretty decent feedback for us to look through.

Of note is that a lot of you were very pleasantly surprised with how the gameplay felt, with the underlying foundation feeling solid. You were also impressed with how our artstyle was translated to the gameplay, albeit in a very basic form, as we stuck with holographic players and adversaries for this preview as well.

On the flip side, you had a bunch of valid concerns. Game performance was a big one, with many of you experiencing uneven stability during your time with the preview. Additionally, latency and jitter were also brought up frequently as something that could use improvement, generally by those with less than ideal connections.

As you are aware, the purpose of the Multiplayer Preview was to gauge how our technology functions in the wild. We were aiming to test how our background infrastructure was coping with the load. To that end, we even hosted the preview in 3 different regions for maximum coverage!

While we were expecting, even hoping for the game to break as frequently as possible so we can get as much info as we could, throughout the testing sessions we discovered that some of the touchpoints listed above — graphical performance, netcode and server stability — could be problematic to PlanetQuest moving forward, especially when it comes to bringing the game we envision to the masses, in particular those on lower-end hardware and less ideal internet connections. We want PQ to be accessible to everybody and it was clear that there was still some work to do in terms of optimization for slower connections and older machines.

Future Developments

So, where does that leave us? Well, not to worry. As the title of this chapter suggests, there is one more piece of the puzzle. Taking your feedback and the limitations of the current tech into account, we started a series of internal experiments with different technical concepts. While they’ve taken a lot of time and effort, those experiments have been progressing at a very steady pace, one we couldn’t have predicted when we started the process. In fact, it’s going better than expected and it has the potential to bring some big changes to PlanetQuest as we know it…

Luckily you won’t have to wait long to find out about these as in the dev blog that’s coming next week, we’ll have a lot more to share with you on what our developers have been working on to meet the challenges thrown at them by the multiplayer preview… As always, stay tuned to our socials for the latest updates and the upcoming dev update…