Escape Together
The Escapists is now fully released on PC and Xbox One.
Locked in prison for a life-long sentence with a hunger for escape, you want to find a way out as soon as possible. However, you’ve made a friend, someone you can trust, and you can’t just leave them behind, can you? The Escapists developers Mouldy Toof explained that although multiplayer is not a priority on the latest full release, it is an aspect that they are considering after the community responses on their original Kickstarter campaign.
Players continue to ask for possibilities to have their own friends in the prison in order to attempt escaping together. Resources, communication and stealth will become difficult to attain and pulling two prisoners out of a high-security prison would provide an extra challenge.
Perhaps you’d be in different cells completely, communicating in discrete ways as you work towards a single plan. Or maybe you both want to escape individually? The Escapists is all about precision, choice and efficiency, and having two perspectives at once would change the game completely.
This particular multiplayer mode would require both prisoners to escape in order to succeed. The main difficulty of this mode would be the forms of communication and way of multiplayer, whether it is local LAN co-op or even online. Currently, The Escapistsdoes not support chat in any way so many aspects will have to be considered before multiplayer is implemented.
Be The Guard
The Escapists involves several prisons and different ways of escaping.
Your job is a fairly simple one, guard and patrol a prison and prevent fights, bad behavior and escapees from succeeding. However, with a game focussed on leaving the prison, prison guards always, and are made, to fail. Now it is your turn to have some power, a high-powered weapon, and a dozen of brawny tough prisoners waiting to take you down and steal your items.
This multiplayer mode would be incredibly fun, but the game mechanics of The Escapistswould have to be modified as a result. A prison guard perspective would be very different, and the apparent obviousness of an escape plan would have to be disguised somehow. The guard may not know which prisoner is trying to escape, but realistically, it would be too easy to find out at this stage.
You would act as how a prison guard would, patrolling the walls, give chilling reminders to who is in charge here and have the full ability to take out any prisoner who gets in your way. Your job would be to watch the prisoners, discover possible ways of them escaping and trying to stop them. This would give a prison guard more power, making escaping more difficult and would require a sense of stealth to catch escapees in the act.
In the current game format as a prison guard, you are made to fail, and despite it being an interesting concept, the repetitiveness would become apparent immediately. The Escapists would have to change many essential mechanics in order for it to work, such as the escaping system and use of items. However, it would be interesting to explore a prison as a guard and access high-security areas freely around a map. Mouldy Toof will have to consider the motive of The Escapists for this particular multiplayer mode to work.
Free For All
The Escapists Multiplayer would have to change a few essential mechanics in order to work.
Limited resources, limited escape routes and only a small window of time to escape the prison, free for all breaks down all the barriers. The Escapists already has a combat system and a variety of crafting recipes for the players to use in order to create their escape plan. Multiplayer can involve all these aspects, but the goal would be to escape at all costs. You can support each other or completely sabotage each others plans discretely, the possibilities are endless.
Free for all can open up more opportunities for interaction, such as trading and sharing resources. You may be trying to escape first, but some situations require some team work in order to progress successfully. Whether you trust another prisoner is your decision, and it can work positively and negatively depending on who you’re playing with. An interesting concept would be to drop multiple players into a prison, each unaware of who is another real player, and trying to be discrete to rat out those who are escaping and take advantage of different opportunities.
This game mode can lead to a lot of intense and hilarious situations, such as leaving your fellow prisoner stranded outside stripped clean whilst you take their items and escape. The difficulty of the different prisons can also change these situations significantly, making items and tools rarer to attain. The other AI prisoners also add to a game mode that has a lot of potential, but would lead to a lot of griefing throughout the map.
Mouldy Toof would have to create some sort of punishment for sabotage so the game mechanics would have to be modified for it to work.
Overall, The Escapists has a lot of potential to have a multiplayer option, but several aspects would have to changed in order to support it. Although nothing has been confirmed for later updates, the developers are continuing to consider the idea to have multiplayer in the game.
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