Any update/ETA on coop? :)

[goodgimp]

I'm not trying to badger at all. Just curious if, with Beta patches rolling out at an awesome rate, if there was a feel yet for when Coop might be introduced?

Sorry for asking, just really really excited about exploring this game with my friends!

[x4000]

I'm not really sure quite yet -- Keith and were talking about that a bit just this morning actually, but we haven't decided anything yet.  This is a Keith-side thing, and he's got a variety of things going on with the macro-game, crests, enchants, and multiplayer all to come within the next month or two as his main foci.  The biggest question with multiplayer is how much the ongoing work that I'm doing on general game balance is going to impact our ability to get multiplayer stable and functioning.

Among a few other internal considerations.  But it's definitely something we're really interested in doing sooner than later, as soon as it makes sense, anyhow.

And lastly, a caveat: the thing to remember when this first hits multiplayer beta is that it's likely to be glitchy as all get out for a few days or a week.  We'll really need lots of feedback to get that cleaned up, and I'm sure it will happen pretty quickly, but this is a big game and there's going to be lots of little edge cases.  So as soon as MP comes out we'll be happy to have people poking at it and seeing what they can do, but the likelihood of things like lost progress, game-breaking issues that prevent continuing until the next patch, and so forth will be really high in multiplayer when that's first out.

And then of course things settle out and everything is good, but there's that brief period of pain that has to be navigated first.

[goodgimp]

Completely understandable (and expected). Again, i hope the question didn't come across as hounding - I can see from the patch notes the crazy amount of work that's being poured into the game! The prospect of Coop in this kind of game just has me more excited than... Wow, I don't know, more than any time in the past 10 years at least. My friends and I often have discussed what our favorite Coop type of game would and it's almost eerie how closely AVWW aligns with our "dream game".

You mention crests and enchants. Has there been a dev diary posted on these yet? I'm intrigued!

[x4000]

Cheers, and thanks for that!

I don't think we've ever explained our plans for enchants, but the short-short version is that they are various buffs to yourself or to NPCs, that make you improved in some way.  It's more complex than that, but that's the gist.

For the crests, I think we've talked about them in at least the forums, but not sure about a diary.  There's probably some details if you search.  But the short-short version of those is that these are spellgem-holders that give buffs to the spellgem.  However, that's just the most basic kind of crest, which holds only one gem.  Better crests can hold a gem and some spellshaping gems to do compound effects.  Things like adding homing, splitting a spell into multiple shots instead of one, or even adding a charge ability so that you can hold the button down to charge up power shots.  All of that stuff with the crests is actually already implemented, but just not available because there are a number of glitches with it that we haven't had time to fix yet what with all the other stuff going on with the game.  And we don't have a "socketing station" interface yet, which is needed for actually putting gems into the various slots in crests, etc.