Multiplayer co-op savings Get a brilliant rendition with Grounded’s shared world system

Playing online games with friends can be a frustrating experience. If the game is hosted on a server, you must depend on that server to be up and running. If the game is hosted peer-to-peer, the server may have to actively play the game or have a machine in the house that they can use to host a server. Obsidian’s Basehowever, found a genius way to solve all of this – and it’s something other developers should be looking to replicate if possible.

WARNING: There was a close-up photo of one of the insects from the Grounded, but we missed any pictures of the spider.

Hit the ground recently hit 1.0 after spending a good amount of time in early accessand what Obsidian brings to us is one of the highest rated games ever. The core conceit is simple: Watch the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids and turn it into a survival game. You drop like one of four children into a world where grass is as big as trees, and trees as big as skyscrapers. This game can be played with up to four players, and it’s meant to be a persistent world that anyone can log into at any time. Base available on Game Pass, so no additional purchases are required to get started, and no developer or publisher servers end up shutting down because it’s peer-to-peer.

When you start a new save, you have the option to save a single player or multiplayer map; you can change this later. Once someone you’ve invited joins the server, they can join while you’re hosting or hosting for themselves.

Instead of storing it on a server, Grounded is hosted by the player who first started the world as a peer-to-peer connection. However, when those players have access to the world, they and anyone else who has played in that world will have access to a synced save that any of them have. can use and synchronize incoming and outgoing. Every time you log in, you get a persistent world whose development and construction you have completed and which you can play regardless of whether the game initiator is available or not. You can host on your PC or Xbox, or join another friend who is hosting and everything is there.

In other words, it’s all the convenience of a hosted game without any cost.

Compare this to Satisfactory, a great game about building conveyor belts on alien planets for the sake of all capitalism. Satisfactory, like Grounded, is peer-to-peer hosted. However, it still requires someone to host an active server in order to play, and saves aren’t synced like this – in other words, when your friend is on vacation for a week, you’re out of luck. until they come back. The other option is to build or rent a dedicated server, which can be quite expensive, with many options costing $12 or $15 per month. If you decide to host the server yourself, you must learn all the commands to manipulate it and make sure it always works.

This method won’t work for every shared multiplayer world – despite the looks of it simple, a game like Minecraft can quickly emerge to take up gigabytes of space. On a densely populated server that means your connection will always be used by some users or others and they will be transferring a lot of data – not ideal in this bandwidth limited age . Storing on a shared save doesn’t make sense. But for many other multiplayer games like this, it’s a great choice. It takes advantage of the cloud saving feature that most major game platforms offer today, it saves power by not running games without anyone else playing, and it balances access by ensuring guarantee that no one has more ownership of the game than anyone else. And since users must be specifically invited, only your friends can sabotage your saves. So it’s really up to you to make sure you have trusted friends.

While multiplayer games themselves and their servers come and go, more general servers like those hosted by Microsoft, Valve and the like aren’t coming any time soon. With no servers to survive, Grounded doesn’t depend on whether Obsidian or Microsoft need to maintain dedicated servers for the game, and players don’t have to worry about some hosting company providing an option for a game. specific play. And in a world where electricity is becoming increasingly expensive both in monetary terms and in environmental costs, not having to run servers all the time will become increasingly important in the coming years. With the popularity of multiplayer games in the shared world, Obsidian is showing some big forward thinking going forward to create its new game to make sure that everyone can access it. for many years to come.