The Salt and Sacrifice team talks about the magic of Soulslike multiplayer communities

blog.playstation.com:

Just over a month ago, we ran our first public network test of Salt and Sacrifice. Shane and I had been working on the game for over two years by that point, and our multiplayer tests had usually run small: a handful of folks, mostly the two of us throwing together different builds and making sure the networking didn’t explode.

But as any Soulslike fan will tell you, there’s more to multiplayer than the base functionality. The real fun comes from that special something you get at scale–when communities form, languages develop, and players dueling each other goes from mechanical to straight-up magical.

Shane and I are obviously both long-time Soulslike fans, and knew that particular brand of magic–the hasty alliances with strangers, the odd gestures, the dedication to fashion over function, the new weapon combos and strategies resulting from hours of investment towards different build paths–wasn’t something we’d likely find in the midst of development. Even with hundreds of hours of internal testing, we were still only playing with the same handful of people each time. So this network test, while also a fantastic source of information on balance, flow, matchmaking, and technical issues, was also the very first time we could legitimately engage in online antics with random folks. In other words: finally experience that Soulslike magic we’d been building up to since we started work on the game. 

And experience it we did.

After spending these precious few pre-launch weeks alternating between full co-op playthroughs of (mostly) final code, tweaking movesets, drop rates, damage scaling, and the like, we can’t wait to experience this with more people. Salt and Sacrifice builds on Salt and Sanctuary’s style of combat, with a