Teardown is a sandbox, action game by Tuxedo Labs, in which players are tasked with completing timed heists in fully destructible environments. With talk of Teardown coming to consoles, fans want to know if multiplayer support is on the way as well. 

Games have touted “fully” destructible environments in the past, but Teardown truly lets players destroy everything, thanks to a proprietary engine, created by lead developer Dennis Gustafsson. Unfortunately, while the engine for Teardown allows for revolutionary gameplay, fans of multiplayer modes might be disappointed at its one, major drawback. 

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Most video games today are constructed out of polygons, which have specific positions based on the coordinates of their vertices, resulting in beautiful environments that appear three-dimensional. Teardown makes use of voxels (the 3D equivalent of two-dimensional pixels), allowing the engine to render changes in the environment, in real-time, based on the player’s interaction with the surrounding voxels, as Tuxedo Labs demonstrates in its Teardown gameplay video. 

However, the rendering of interactive, physical objects in real-time requires a lot of processing and would be complicated by the introduction of online multiplayer. In a post on the Steam Discussions page, Gustafsson provided answers to a few, frequently asked questions, including a decisive verdict on multiplayer support. He expressed his concern that it may not be possible at all to synchronize, over the internet, the amount of physics required for the game to work, and clarified that it’s certainly not possible with an independent team as small as Tuxedo Labs. 

Gustafsson provided more details in an article with Escapist Magazine, stating that networked physics can either be achieved by ensuring that all clients behave in precisely the same way whenever inputs are received, or by synchronizing the state of every object across all clients, continuously. However, the former would cause an unacceptable amount of lag for players, while the latter would require significant bandwidth, while also causing glitches any time that two players interact with the same object. In other words, synchronizing voxels across multiple devices - in a world where every, individual voxel can be interacted with at any moment - requires computing power beyond what web-based, multiplayer systems can provide. 

Gustafsson did offer a little hope for fans who would want to see a multiplayer version of the game in the (possibly distant) future. He posited that cloud streaming, when or if it comes, could offer solutions to these issues by allowing all clients to run the game on rapid, internal connections within a centralized server farm, but added that there could be other, unforeseen issues that come with that technology as well.

Whatever the future may hold, there will be no multiplayer mode coming to Teardown in any official capacity, though modders may be working on a solution. Alternatively, there's at least one other developer teasing a voxel sandbox game, so although Tuxedo Labs has no plans to tackle the issues with voxel-based multiplayer, perhaps others may take up the cause.

Teardown is available now on PC as a Steam Early Access game.

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Source: Tuxedo Labs on Steam / Escapist Magazine