Supergiant Games' Transistor will feature under-the-hood multiplayer elements

Before revealing Transistor, Supergiant Games’ only other game was Bastion, which was a strictly single player affair. And while Transistor seems to be taking many queues from Bastion, an interiew of Creative Director Greg Kasavin with RockPaperShotgun reveals that the company is going to add a strange multiplayer component.

The first thing Kasavin states is that the game won’t have the typical multiplayer game mode. It won’t have deathmatches, since the game isn’t tuned towards that kind of combat. “The combat maybe could work in multiplayer, but I don’t see this game having deathmatch arenas or whatever. I think I can say that pretty safely,” Kasavin explained.

Instead, the game seems to be more similar to Dark Souls than to the likes of a Diablo game. “Something we’re more interested in is a sense of feeling connected to other people who are playing in a subtle way,” Kasavin said. “You can still have your personal experience around the story, but you always know you belong in a larger [world]. For example, players can sometimes see traces of other players’ paths moving around. Things of that nature. What’s interesting to us about this world is that it lends itself to some interesting things like that.”

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Hopefully, this game won’t need an always-online connection

For now, a co-op mode like that of Torchlight or other hack-and-slash games won’t be in the game, but the company has considered it even during the development of Bastion. “We actually prototyped co-op in Bastion, and we cut it because [it just didn’t fit],” he said. “Traditionally, we agree that co-op is probably the most enjoyable way to play action-RPGs – with 1-3 other people. But we found it to be quite at odds with our narrative goals. When we had three people running around in Bastion, they just started goofing off and messing up the narration.”

“We also want the narrative and atmosphere to be important in Transistor, so having two characters running around at the same time would come at a heavy cost. It may open up some interesting gameplay opportunities, but at the expense of other areas. It’s not in the cards for us right now. But again, the part where you don’t feel alone in the world is very important to us. Solitude can be a very powerful feeling in games, but we want to use it intentionally. We don’t just want it to be the default mode of being in the game. We’d rather play around with it and use it purposefully.”

Transistor is set in a sci-fi world. The story goes: Everyone has a voice in Cloudbank. The city’s most influential voices are vanishing one by one, and now it’s Red’s turn. Players assume the role of a young woman who gains control of a powerful weapon after a mysterious group of assailants nearly kills her with it. Now she must fight from street to street against forces that will stop at nothing to recover the weapon. During the course of the adventure, players will piece together the Transistor’s mysteries as they pursue its former owners.