Gears of Breakfast has announced that the A Hat in Time Online Party outage is expected to continue for "several weeks" while it explores new technical solutions for online multiplayer.
A Hat in Time is a 3D action platformer that features the same kind of great gameplay from franchises such as Banjo-Kazooie. First released in October 2017, it has continued to get new content updates, DLC, and features over the years. Unfortunately, one of these new features -- online multiplayer -- has been broken for a couple of weeks, and now it looks like there aren't any easy fixes for the problem.
What's Happening With A Hat In Time Online Party?
A Hat in Time Online Party first went offline last month due to a Steam Client update that took place on March 4, 2022. It's not quite clear what happened here, but something in this update broke online multiplayer.
Unfortunately, developer Gears for Breakfast says that Valve has not been responding to its requests for help in a status update earlier today -- and that means it's probably going to have to figure out a new implementation for online multiplayer -- here's the full text of its statement:
The outage of Online Party due to a Steam Client update is ongoing. This outage impacts both standard online party as well as Vanessa’s Curse.
We are continuing to work on a solution, but anticipate this outage to continue for several weeks as we identify and implement a solution. Playing Online Party and Vanessa’s Curse is not recommended at current, as your experience will vary.
Given the great collaborative effort put forth to achieve Online Party, our hopes were to resolve this with the team at Valve. However, as the weeks have progressed, many of our communications have gone unanswered.
As a result we are actively looking into external solutions that we'll be prototyping on the 'experimental' Steam beta starting Wednesday, April 6th.
We apologize for the impact this has had, and want to thank you for your continued patience.
While this is certainly disappointing for some, it looks like a fix is going to start undergoing testing on the "experimental" Steam Beta branch for the game on April 6. Keep in mind that this is early prototype testing -- you shouldn't expect things to work perfectly right away (and that's if it even works at all).
Although A Hat in Time Online Party is down for now, there's still plenty of fun to be had in single-player -- you can buy A Hat in Time on PC and consoles starting at $29.99 or your regional equivalent via its official website.
