Vampire Survivors' free-roaming online mode is available to play in beta now, and there's an official boardgame coming too

(Image credit: Poncle)

Vampire Survivors' long-anticipated online mode is finally here, sort of. Developer Poncle announced at the end of this week that online multiplayer has been implemented in the game's beta branch.

Vampire Survivors has of course had multiplayer functionality for several years. But playing with pals was previously limited to local co-op. Getting Vampire Survivors to work online has proved quite the challenge, as broken down by the online mode's developer Coherence in a fascinating blog from April. For example, each of Vampire Survivors' multitudinous enemies rely on local physics interactions, making it very tricky to make those interactions concurrent across a network.

Online mode brings a few important differences to both regular solo play and local co-op. For starters, players are free to roam around the environment as they please when playing online, rather than being restricted to the screen area as is the case with local play. Moreover, players all level up simultaneously, meaning everyone needs to hit the XP cap before levelling can commence. And if you want to play any of the expansions in online co-op, you'll all need to own said expansion before that is possible.

Alongside the online mode's beta rollout, Poncle also revealed that a Vampire Survivors boardgame is in the works, just in case you want a turn-based version of Vampire Survivors that takes up a load of physical space. Poncle says it has "spent a long time making sure the board game 'feels' as much like Vampire Survivors as possible" with features including run-based play where you unlock new stuff, a built-in levelling system and key playable characters from the original game.

An image of the Vampire Survivors boardgame box art. — (Image credit: Poncle)

Finally, Poncle provided a sneak peek of Vampire Survivors' next major update, which will introduce two new stages, two new weapons (plus evolutions), a "party mode" that enables solo players to be accompanied by friendly NPCs, and two new playable characters (spoilers follow). One of these rolls a dice every 30 seconds to provide various random bonuses, while the other causes "explosive props" to appear while moving around.

If you want to play Vampire Survivors online, you'll first need to switch to the appropriate branch within Vampire Survivors' properties menu on Steam. Fortunately, it's a pretty straightforward process explained by Poncle in its announcement.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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