The Ship: Remasted Cruises Into Early Access

Poop poop! That is the sound of The Ship: Remasted [official site] sailing into Early Access. I assume. I have no idea what noise the actual ship makes in the game. Perhaps it's more of a WHAAAAAAAAAAAP WHAAAAAAAAAAAP? While I try to research that here is some information on this Early Access development:

The Ship is that game where you play a character aboard a ship of NPCs - it's an FPS so you have a target to kill, as do your competitors. Key to your success will be picking off your own target while attending the needs of your avatar's digital flesh (dining, weeing, snoozing...) and avoiding being killed yourself.

Last week the developers of Remasted decided to delay the launch slightly while they added relay server functionality meaning the game would at least have some basic online multiplayer functionality rather than sticking with LAN options.

I don't think it had even occurred to me that you would consider launching a game like this without online multiplayer functionality. ANYHOODLE. If you were to pick up the game today you can expect:

• LAN Games – live and working well (16 players). Check out Yogcast’s recent playthrough of a LAN game to get an idea of performance.
• Hosted Relay Games – we’ve rolled this option out to testers and it’s working in a limited capacity (we're working with Unity to resolve these issues). Until then, these matches are limited to 4 players and there will be a cap on concurrent users. This means that if everyone decides to join a game at the same time, some of you may experience connection problems. Please bear with us on this one!
• Standalone Servers – currently in internal testing and we'd expect this to become available within a matter of weeks. This will allow players to setup their own self-hosted servers without the limitations of hosted relay matches, but would require rendering support (your host machine would need a graphics card to run the host instance of the game). This is intended as a mid-way solution to full dedicated servers.
• Dedicated Servers – a downloadable tool that will run headless (no rendering support required). This is also currently in internal testing and should be available shortly after standalone servers.

So a makeshift solution of sorts - you can play online with up to 4 people as long as not too many people want to do that at the same time. Online multiplayer support should then expand and improve according to these plans.

You can get a more detailed look at what stage the game is at on the development roadmap where they talk more about elements like maps, systems and features as well as whether these are operational or not.

If that all floats your boat (HILARIOUS) you can pick the game up for £14.99 on Steam (there's also a discount for the remainder of February) but as usual all the caveats and warnings about Early Access apply.