Been following this game since 2013, long time lurker, love the community.

Seems like Hello Games never intended to create the seamlessly super-connected googleverse many of us had hoped for. Instead, we were given a singleplayer-focused experience with little to no online player interactions.

Which is fine, I guess.

However, after interpreting the LT dev logs and after watching the Youtube stuff I realized that No Man's Sky really is a barebone version of what Josh Parnell is trying (tried?) to accomplish.

I therefore suggest that this project is way too big for a single guy with, to the best of my knowledge, no prior commercial game dev experience.

I do however think that the things he showed us a million years ago are amazing. I also think that there is a lesson to learn from NMS's debut:

People are really interested in interacting with other people in a huge ass space game. Why not fill in the gap with a Limit Theory that focuses on multiplayer?

I'm not sure how much this limits the scope of the game as we haven't seen anything for a long time. I do however think that you can vastly simplify the mechanics of LT to allow for a smaller yet more focused multiplayer-focused experience.

You can also take advantage of people's enthusiasm by being a little playful and allow for mods. Maybe by following the steps of Valve by providing a curated mod approval scheme a la Counter Strike and DOTA 2?

I realize this isn't what a lot of people are looking for, but who cares because all we are is dust in the wind.

I don't know, I'm no mortal man.

You should hang around more.

Limit Theory: Multiplayer Mod is totally a thing in planning stages.
Josh has provided the requisite API for sockets, so it's just a matter of decoupling input from gamestate changes and producing a modified version of LT as a server.

Many of us who are here from Freelancer backgrounds see LT as the real successor to FL, and FL had Multiplayer.
Therefore, we want multiplay. :V
Therefore, we make it happen, post release.

Since that would be pretty much the opposite if what the kickstarter promised (a single player only game), no.
After all, another thing to be learned from nms is not to promise gameplay features and then not putting them in the game

Silverware wrote:You should hang around more.

Limit Theory: Multiplayer Mod is totally a thing in planning stages.
Josh has provided the requisite API for sockets, so it's just a matter of decoupling input from gamestate changes and producing a modified version of LT as a server.

Many of us who are here from Freelancer backgrounds see LT as the real successor to FL, and FL had Multiplayer.
Therefore, we want multiplay. :V
Therefore, we make it happen, post release.

Hey! I'll try my best but I've never been good with forums...

Anyways, sounds like a plan, alright. I would however like to play with the idea of reducing the ambitions of LT to a multiplayer-focused experience and thereby perhaps speed up the dev process to a... more conceivable and reasonable time frame?

Dinosawer wrote:Since that would be pretty much the opposite if what the kickstarter promised (a single player only game), no.
After all, another thing to be learned from nms is not to promise gameplay features and then not putting them in the game

I take the whole concept of Kickstarter and the obligations a creator has to his or her investor(s) very seriously. I would however, as I said above, like to play with the thought of changing the scope of LT to something simpler and perhaps make it more reasonable for a product to be delivered in the first place, in one state or another.

I realize I sound a bit negative but Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine.

Getting really late here, gtg for now!

I just don't understand the whole "multi player makes things better," thinking. Personally, I want a single player game, but if you can also play multiplayer, you know, like in the olden days when you could connect IP to IP, that would be fine.

But multiplayer focused? No thanks. Besides, I seriously doubt that would speed up delivery time at this point, he would most likely have to change and rebalance quite a few things to have a multi focus.

Changing horses mid stream this late in the game would only make things worse. Modding is the way to go for this aspect.

Hey, If the MP Mod is done right Poet...
Then there is no reason why you cant be playing single player, then invite someone to join.
Provided I get a couple of servers in the wild somewhere, we can do NAT punching...

Then yes, you could be playing single player, then invite someone into the game, suddenly you are playing with your Belgian friend.

Silverware wrote:Hey, If the MP Mod is done right Poet...
Then there is no reason why you cant be playing single player, then invite someone to join.
Provided I get a couple of servers in the wild somewhere, we can do NAT punching...

Then yes, you could be playing single player, then invite someone into the game, suddenly you are playing with your Belgian friend.

Heh, got someone in mind? Yeah, I have NO problem with a MOD that makes it possible. I am just against vanilla LT being multiplayer focused.

Hello! Glad you de-lurked.

My impression of NMS and multiplayer was exactly the opposite: that it's clearly a single-player game that inexplicably had an online capability forced on it (probably by Sony), which was "justified" with the "you can name planets" mini-feature. It didn't seem too surprising when it was reported that players who actually found each other couldn't interact.

I'm pretty much with Poet:

Poet1960 wrote:I have NO problem with a MOD that makes it possible. I am just against vanilla LT being multiplayer focused.

That's about 50/50 between "doesn't need multi-player focus" and "oh, no, no, no, please don't distract Teh Josh."

A multiplayer game without interaction isn't multiplayer, it's online single player, do it right or don't do it at all.

Leave it for the mod and for LT2 if Josh does one after LT.

Poet1960 wrote:I just don't understand the whole "multi player makes things better," thinking. Personally, I want a single player game, but if you can also play multiplayer, you know, like in the olden days when you could connect IP to IP, that would be fine.

But multiplayer focused? No thanks. Besides, I seriously doubt that would speed up delivery time at this point, he would most likely have to change and rebalance quite a few things to have a multi focus.

Changing horses mid stream this late in the game would only make things worse. Modding is the way to go for this aspect.

I remember being a youngster and would dream of the day that technology would allow long distance multiplayer a reality. Particularly mass multiplayer.

I played some of the early MMO's and did the counter strike thing when it was all the rage.

It made me figure out how much people generally suck and how much I loved single player games... Though Ultima Online caused me to drop out of school for a year. Seems like a loser thing to do now, and well.. it felt like a loser thing to do back then too.

I generally avoid all multiplayer now other than playing with my son. Though I have been playing some Dead By Daylight, and ya.. people still suck.

Yeah, the only multiplayer I do is with friends (rarely) or card games, where it is literally impossible to be a jerk.

Silverware wrote:Therefore, we make it happen, post release.

Emphasis mine.

Because obviously Limit Theory is already a quite demanding project, and multiplayer would make it more demanding.

I think it would be unwise to try and include multiplayer in version 1.0 (or even 1.x) .

AlxndrM wrote:I therefore suggest that this project is way too big for a single guy with, to the best of my knowledge, no prior commercial game dev experience.

I do think this is what it all boils down to. Looking at a project like NMS, how many are working on it and how many years it took, how could one guy possibly pull off something like that himself? Sadly, I feel Josh has dug himself into a deep hole that he has no idea how to get out of, either programmically, financially, or professionally. My impression is (and he's given us nothing to change this) that he's gotten in way over his head and as good a person as he is, there's just no light at the end of the tunnel.

I was saddened, what a year ago?, when Josh chucked the entire game and stared over with a new engine - setting him back, basically, to the beginning again.

Josh, I hope and pray you find away out of this mess, I'm just not seeing any indication that it will happen. I no longer have faith, but I do have hope that you'll pull this off eventually.

Rabiator wrote:

Silverware wrote:Therefore, we make it happen, post release.

Emphasis mine.
[...]

Silverware wrote:Therefore, we make it happen, post release.

Emphasize mine. Silver meant us modders. Josh already made it clear he isn't gonna do multiplayer, but is going to give us sockets (which are in Python by default anyway) so we can mod it in.

Limit Theory, single player.

So happy!