Ys X is going to feature local coop at launch on PC!

Hi everyone!

I am really happy to announce that Ys X: Nordics will support local cooperative play for 2 players at launch. Before moving on to discussing the feature in more depth, there are a few very important facts I need to clarify:

• This is still an experimental, unofficial feature, developed by me personally with a budget of 0 €, and some pretty wild hacks.

• While the standard single-player game has had many full passes from dozens of in-house and external beta testers, to the best of my knowledge the only people who completed the entire game in coop are my friend and I. Please keep that in mind.

With that out of the way, let's talk coop!

Background & Development

Those who have been following the franchise on PC for a while might know that we first introduced local coop in our patch for Ys VIII. It was an extremely experimental feature, restricted to just combat areas, but a core group of people (including yours truly) greatly enjoyed it even with those limitations.

For Ys IX, I spent quite some time improving cooperative play in many aspects, and in addition to sporting some quality-of-life improvements coop now also worked for many non-combat interactions -- such as opening chests or initiating dialogues with NPCs were supported for both players. However, the Ys IX local coop patch was only completed substantially after the game was released.

With Ys X following a different overall development strategy and timeline, it was possible for me to start working on coop much earlier, with the goal of completing it in time for release. This was not easy, and it is only possible because I spent some time almost every weekend since March working on it. A particular challenge was the fact that Ys X is built on top of an entirely new engine and technology stack compared to Ys IX -- so while I could re-use a lot of the implementation from VIII to IX and spend time focusing on polish and adding new features, coop in Ys X basically meant starting from scratch.

Nonetheless, I think the coop feature in Nordics ended up being the most intricately developed and polished across all the games so far, and I hope that coop aficionados everywhere enjoy it.

Coop Overview

To get started playing in coop, you first need to enable the general feature in the "Coop" tab of the settings menu:

You can then press the "Select" button (or equivalent) on the second controller to enable or disable coop.

Towards the top right corner of the screen, an icon will display the current "Coop State", with the following options:

These mean, respectively:

• RemovedCoop DisabledCoop is disabled, you can enable it by pressing select on the second player's controller.
• AddedCoop ImpossibleCoop is enabled in principle, but currently it's impossible to play in coop due to some factor, e.g. only one character being available, or one of a few very rare restricted scenes happening.

• Coop Active: Coop is active during normal gameplay, and each player controls their assigned character (as per the settings that govern coop character selection).

• AddedShip CoopCoop is enabled while sailing around on the ship. How this is handled depends on the "Coop Ship Control" setting, either with shared or split control, or assigned entirely to one of the players.
• AddedFishing CoopCoop is enabled while fishing. The meaning of this depends on the "Coop Fishing" setting: either just one player