Multiplayer

Original multiplayer

Perhaps the biggest blow to Oni's reception was that there was no multiplayer option. Combined with complaints about the AI, players wanted to be able to play against other humans, but this option, although developed internally at Bungie West, was not included in the release due to the constraints of Internet gameplay latency at the time. 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; Overgrowth a.k.a. Lugaru 2 promises LAN support only; Mirror's Edge ; a notable exception seems to be State of Emergency, a melee-oriented game that apparently had reasonably fluid online multiplayer).

It is not clear why Bungie did not at least include LAN play functionality, since it was being used in their office for netgames and can be seen in use about 30 minutes into THIS video (you can see the 2-minute sequence on its own HERE; notably, these 2 minutes are the only Oni-related sequence in all of the Bungie TV broadcasts). However, it is likely that multiplayer suffered from more than latency, and that the developers/publishers, well aware of the other shortcomings of the game, didn't want to add potentially frustrating netplay to the lot.

More sightings

screenshots

Bungie TV day 2 (30 minutes)

2-minute excerpt from the above, where Steve Abeyta demo,strates disarms on a human opponent.

other videos (a lot of them, actually...)

Interviews

Kevin Armstrong (networking programmer, muahahaha; bald guy in above pics)

Steve Abeyta (prompted to mention "Oni Soccer" along with kickable furniture)

Fake multiplayer

Oni Team Arena. Developed by geyser, after an "Unreal Tournament" attempt by Script10000, with help from Your_Mom and EdT. Emulates multiplayer-like gameplay with respawning bots, meant to experiment with advanced modding, multiplayer-oriented or not (e.g., AI or collision upgrades). Project page HERE. Currently more or less maintained by Gumby, but don't hold your breath (ADD, scope creep, whatever).

Apart from gameplay videos such as THIS one, a remarkable scene (heartwarming and disturbing at the same time... geyser 04:13, 6 October 2008 (CEST) ) is that of Russian kids playing Oni Team Arena and enjoying themselves tremendously.

Fan-made multiplayer

Multiplayer was cut at pre-beta and so wasn't available even to the beta testers. No source code has leaked into the community to this day, pre-beta or otherwise. Even so, there were efforts to reverse-engineer Oni's runtime to a point of synchronizing relevant structures of the game's state between computers.

OniPlayer was a project coordinated by typhen and involving Alloc, Kumo, and ssg. Up to the departure of typhen, the project remained in the address-finding phase, with applications limited to Alloc's OniTrainer and typhen's OniFly (the Trainer allowed the user to set or freeze most of the known variables on demand, whereas OniFly performed elaborate freezing on character positions based on their aiming vector). Later, neonew put the knowledge to use with OniHook, actually tracking and patching a character's animations as if synchronizing action over a network.

Current knowledge of Oni's game-state and character-state structures is very nearly sufficient for multiplayer, combining memory watching and patching driven by Oni's own events, hooked for the purpose. Current development includes for minimal patches to the engine (implementing stuff like chr_focus and chr_location for the Mac, disabling MELE loss for dying characters so as to take advantage of Oni's frag/damage counters, making Oni's combat stats accessible from BSL, ...) and Flatline.