13AM Games on why Runbow Pocket won’t have local multiplayer and StreetPass
13AM Games recently came out and said that Runbow Pocket won’t include local multiplayer or StreetPass support. Instead, the team opted to focus on online multiplayer.
Nintendo Life has now received an explanation from 13AM Games as to why local multiplayer features won’t be included. Here’s what the studio had to say:
The way multiplayer options work on the 3DS and New 3DS can go one of two ways… “local multiplayer features” and “online multiplayer.” Local multiplayer features like StreetPass and Local Play use Nintendo’s NEX servers and API and online multiplayer servers work the way we have things in Runbow.
We’re one of the first teams to bring a Unity title to New 3DS. We already faced a few challenges scaling down the game to fit the full Runbow experience, single player and all, into a smaller machine, and on top of that adding different types of networking to our already complex netcode was a risk that we were not comfortable taking. We were left with a choice: Use the online system we already have in place, something that we know works and is fun, or uproot the code and build it for local features instead, while these features were still being added to the Unity engine. The latter option produced an unknowable: how long would this take us? Will it work? How many New 3DS owners are friends with New 3DS owners in the same square mile? Unity has done a great job in helping us with whatever direction we wanted to go, but at the end of the day we thought it was of greater value to our players to give them an online experience where they can play with anyone, anywhere in the world, just like the original Runbow.
Instead of having to find other New 3DS owners, you and your friends can jump into an online game of Runbow anywhere there is a wi-fi connection. Because of this, we also had to forgo the StreetPass features. We know this comes as a bit of a bummer to our fans, but at the end of the day it was important to us to preserve as much of the original Runbow experience as possible. From our massive single player campaign to those wild online matches with anyone in the world.
