For all you Spelunky fans out there, today's a great day for you, because Spelunky 2 crossplay is now available as part of the game's latest update. This means that Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch players will be able to play the game together in the Adventure and Arena modes. Interestingly, while the "major goals" for multiplayer have all been met, further improvements to the Spelunky 2 online experience are planned. Let's talk about it, shall we?
What else is planned for Spelunky 2?
To start, I can tell you what's definitely not being planned for Spelunky 2: more singleplayer content. Yes, sadly, the Spelunky 2 team will continue focusing on the Spelunky 2 multiplayer and won't be introducing any extra singleplayer stuff. Don't expect huge additions like Spelunky 2 crossplay, but there will be more updates to the game that will focus on improving the online experience. However, if there are game-breaking problems and bugs for singleplayer, then fixing those is "on the table". You'd think a fix would be definite, but we'll have to see.
Adding crossplay was apparently a tricky endeavor, even though Spelunky 2 seems relatively technically straightforward from an outside perspective. At the game's worst for online, "there are four players running a double-layered level with destructible terrain, liquid simulation, and high interactivity, where nothing in the level can be disabled temporarily, even when it's out of view", as the devs say. That doesn't sound so bad when everyone is running the game on a PlayStation 4 or Nintendo Switch, but with crossplay there's now different platforms having to sync up with each other, which made it difficult to estimate a completion time.
Apparently the Spelunky 2 devs were aiming to introduce crossplay to the game earlier, but with game development being as hard as it is, they didn't make it in time. If you're one of the people who waited for Spelunky 2 to release after a long delay, you should know the drill by now.
What's included in the latest Spelunky 2 update?
Not much else was added to the update besides Spelunky 2 crossplay. Missing developers and QA were added to the credits, which is nice, and online play has received network synchronization improvements and server-side latency improvements for low-latency sessions. Multiple desyncs and crashes have been fixed, and a few issues that occurred when beating the game online have been fixed, which is pretty funny. Imagine beating the game online and the game freaks out. For myself at least, I'd be like "who cares! I've beaten the game. See ya!"
You should know that there were also some issues introduced with the patch. They are included below:
- Player gating of players playing with old builds is not in place, sessions with mismatched versions will cause frag on sync.
- "Cross-Play" filter on leaderboards is not present on Steam
Yes, there are only two issues, but forewarned is forearmed, so if you encounter these issues, you now know why.
For more information on Spelunky 2 and other platformers, stay tuned to TechRaptor.
