Beat Saber developer Beat Games (formerly Hyperbolic Magnetism), has confirmed work on a competitive multiplayer mode for the popular rhythm game, which may in the future include custom avatars and sabers.
Beat Saber currently offers global, friend, and local leaderboards for users to compare high scores, but developer Beat Games says that a real-time competitive multiplayer mode is now in the works. The company hired a former community member (‘Umbranoxus’), who was already developing an unofficial multiplayer mod for the game, to spearhead the project.
The studio says that the first multiplayer mode will be “very basic”, allowing players to play the same level together and see who comes out with the top score. It’s expected that more varied multiplayer modes will be offered in the future. We expect the PC and PSVR versions of Beat Saber will both get multiplayer, but probably won’t see cross-play between platforms.
The initial version of Beat Saber multiplayer will offer default avatars, but the studio says they plan to add custom avatars to the game in the future. Custom sabers are also under consideration for future updates, Beat Games says.
But what of the highly anticipated custom level editor? While it was initially planned to be released shortly after the game’s launch, the studio wrote recently there were large underlying adjustments that needed to be made to the game to support the custom level editor:
On release day, the game in Early Access was working properly, but we were aware of a few smaller issues in code, which needed to be solved. We decided to release Beat Saber anyway.
And it was huge! The community and the whole VR world was amazed by the game and we knew we have to work hard to make it even better. We decided to get back to those problematic parts of the code and rewrite them. Soon realising it would need a whole refactoring of UI and editor code. To be honest, refactoring took us much longer than we expected and it still requires some more work. But the good thing is that from now on, it will be much easier for us to implement new features or deploy updates and make edits. Now we can focus only on a new content.
The level editor continues to be the studio’s top priority, and they say it will launch before the multiplayer mode.
