During our interview with Modern Dream’s Ollie Clarke on Nov. 8, we asked the studio head the current status of Typing of the Dead: Overkill’s online co-op mode, which was promised to soon be coming as free downloadable content.
“I’m literally in a room right next to the guy’s finishing multiplayer. We’ve been playing it, making sure there aren’t any issues that are progress stoppers in that you can’t complete the game, and we’re very close on that,” Clarke said. “I’m hoping we’ll have something pretty solid to send out very soon. But it’s SEGA’s call as to when it goes out, but the word ‘imminent’ would be fair.”
Clarke went on to say that the studio knew it wanted to include multiplayer from the outset of development but didn’t know quite how big the challenge was going to be.
“Multiplayer is hard because games are virtual worlds and what you’re trying to do with multiplayer is create two virtual worlds that mirror each other,” he said. “If they go out of sync at any one point, it’s like the quantum theory of multiple dimensions, and before you know it, they just look completely different from one another so you have to keep them communicating across a whole range of features and systems and functions. That’s been an immense challenge, and I’m glad to say we’re almost there.”
He also gave a brief rundown of how the online co-op modes will work.
“It’s an interesting kind of multiplayer, which I have not quite seen seen anywhere else, in that you can either compete to get all the words, or you can say ‘You take the words on the right, and I’ll take the words on the left’ and you can organize and cooperate to get through the levels more easily,” he said. “Or you can get competitive with each other at the same time and try to out-type each other, get the high score, get more combos and all the pick-ups before the other guy can.”
“It’s kind of an interesting mix between competitive and cooperative,” Clarke added. “The mini-games you’ll be able to play as well.”
We reached out to Clarke to see if the included House of the Dead: Overkill will also include online co-op and will update this post once we hear back from him. You can hear the rest of the our interview with Clarke in this week’s episode of the SEGA Nerdcast, which will soon be available.
[Update: Clarke confirmed that online co-op will be extended to House of the Dead: Overkill once it’s released.]