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Multiplayer: Difference between revisions
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The lack of multiplayer in the final product may have been the biggest blow to Oni's reception. Combined with complaints about the AI, players wanted to be able to play against other humans. The public viewed this as another sign of the game's incompletion, comparing Oni to FPS titles with multiplayer such as Unreal and Quake, and failing to recognize that melee combat over the Internet was nearly impossible at that time (and still is; [http://wolfire.com/overgrowth Overgrowth] a.k.a. Lugaru 2 promises LAN support only; a notable exception from Oni's time period seems to be [[State of Emergency]], a melee-oriented game that apparently had reasonably fluid online multiplayer). | The lack of multiplayer in the final product may have been the biggest blow to Oni's reception. Combined with complaints about the AI, players wanted to be able to play against other humans. The public viewed this as another sign of the game's incompletion, comparing Oni to FPS titles with multiplayer such as Unreal and Quake, and failing to recognize that melee combat over the Internet was nearly impossible at that time (and still is; [http://wolfire.com/overgrowth Overgrowth] a.k.a. Lugaru 2 promises LAN support only; a notable exception from Oni's time period seems to be [[State of Emergency]], a melee-oriented game that apparently had reasonably fluid online multiplayer). | ||
Some questioned why Bungie did not at least include LAN play functionality, since visitors to Bungie's booths were able to play 4-8 player LAN games (pictured at right, video below) at the [[wikipedia:Electronic_Entertainment_Expo|E3]] of May 1999 in Los Angeles, the New York City [[wikipedia:Macworld_Conference_%26_Expo|Macworld Expo]] of July 1999 and the San Francisco Macworld Expo of January 2000. However, multiplayer seems to have had latency issues even on LAN, and without more time to | Some questioned why Bungie did not at least include LAN play functionality, since visitors to Bungie's booths were able to play 4-8 player LAN games (pictured at right, video below) at the [[wikipedia:Electronic_Entertainment_Expo|E3]] of May 1999 in Los Angeles, the New York City [[wikipedia:Macworld_Conference_%26_Expo|Macworld Expo]] of July 1999 and the San Francisco Macworld Expo of January 2000. However, multiplayer seems to have had latency issues even on LAN; Hardy LeBel [http://web.archive.org/web/20010816164220/http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/00/lebel/ stated], "The biggest factor in the decision to remove multiplayer support was the technological hurdle. We had been playing Oni over our office LAN and consistently experienced serious problems synching up the characters in multiplayer battles." Additionally, without more time to developer the gameplay for MP mode, the developers did not want to frustrate players with an incomplete netplay feature. | ||
For a period of time, starting from the announcement that MP had been cut, until some months after Oni's release, it was hoped that Oni would be patched to add in multiplayer. However, as Bungie no longer owned the code, it would have fallen on Take Two to perform this work. Whether due to the difficulty of learning and building on Bungie's code, or lack of financial motivation, no patches were made to Oni. | For a period of time, starting from the announcement that MP had been cut, until some months after Oni's release, it was hoped that Oni would be patched to add in multiplayer. However, as Bungie no longer owned the code, it would have fallen on Take Two to perform this work. Whether due to the difficulty of learning and building on Bungie's code, or lack of financial motivation, no patches were made to Oni. | ||