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Online Coop in For The King

Very recently we opened the official ‘For The King’ Twitch Channel and starting this upcoming weekend we are going to begin streaming our own local coop games. We’ll explain how we play and shine some light on the subtleties we’ve noticed people wondering about. We’d like to encourage anyone playing the game currently that is involved in the Twitch community to stream their games! We will watch as many as we possibly can and you may unknowingly alter the future of FTK.
At some point during development we had to put online play on the shelf until we established more of the game systems. All the programming we’ve done has been designed to accommodate online multiplayer but it hasn’t been tested fully in a long time. Now that we are much further along we have begun to test online coop again and get it back into a good state. Dave has been working tirelessly ensuring that single player, local coop and online coop all work well together. We are looking to do one final Beta push that includes online multiplayer.
Recently we were asked for a bit more transparency on the development side of things and to better explain what has been causing the delays so I would like to talk a bit about that. First off, our initial vision for the game was only single player and online coop exclusively for PC/Mac/Linux. We had many requests for local couch coop during the Kickstarter campaign but we were opposed to it at the time due to the games design not completely supporting it.

In the spring of last year we had a big decision to make on whether or not to port For the King to console and once we decided yes, we suddenly had a lot more work to do. We revisited the idea of local coop and worked out what was holding us back. There were many intangibles which needed to be solved that would ultimately dictate how our UX and UI was designed across the entire game. Every element of the user interaction had to be painstakingly rethought while staying true to what we already had.
Our plan had now changed from doing controller support after PC release to doing it beforehand which, in hindsight, was the right call. We are also now far more prepared for a console release which is a win for our team. It was a big undertaking but it has emerged (in my opinion) as the best way to enjoy For the King and has added so much value to the game! If you have 3 controllers we would love to hear your thoughts on local coop in its current state. Single player is a blast but everything’s better with friends.
We also ended up adding an entire new realm (The Rogue Isles), extra enemies and other content to ensure we had enough of a mix to keep the play throughs feeling fresh. We now have a stronger base to expand upon in the future and we feel the product itself will be much better than we initially hoped. Thank you for your patience.
Check out For The King on Steam, coming soon to Early Access.