The puzzle that kicked off with Don't Starve's Reign of Giants teaser trailer has finally been solved. Don't Starve is getting multiplayer, folks.
Klei Entertainment confirmed the arrival of multiplayer via a free expansion titled Don't Starve Together. Though the developer can't reveal all of the details just yet, they did address the highly controversial subject.
"We promised we would make Don’t Starve the best single player game that we could. To us, this meant using the resources that we had allocated to Don’t Starve and keeping them focused on delivering on that promise. We were not willing to sacrifice our goals for the game to work on a multiplayer version. This was the point we tried to get across in our our original decision," Klei explained.
"As we developed Don’t Starve, multiplayer slowly turned into a hot button issue in the community. Ok, let’s face it… it was always a hot button issue. A lot of people have voiced their feelings that multiplayer would be perfect in Don’t Starve. However, at the time we didn’t have the resources to make it happen and we weren't confident that it would actually work both in concept and implementation.
"It was (and still is) important to us that multiplayer would not only be interesting for you to play, but also something that we would feel proud of creating," the developer said.
Long story short, Klei secretly hired some more developers, threw together a concept proof, and after a few months decided multiplayer could work in Don't Starve. Details and features are still being tossed around, but Klei hopes it will have "most of (if not all) the normal features in Don't Starve, balanced for multiplayer." They even hinted at potentially including a few new features. They are aiming to support 2-4 players simultaneously, but it could be more.
Don't Starve Together doesn't yet have an exact release date, but the target window is "late summer 2014". It will be available as a free expansion on Steam/Standalone, but other platforms beyond that are "too early to tell." Once Don't Starve Together releases in Alpha, the price of Don't Starve will go up to $19.99.
Most importantly, the single player version of Don't Starve will not be affected by the addition of multiplayer.
[Klei]
