Top-down survival game Wayward to add multiplayer

Wayward attracted a fair amount of attention back in 2013 while it was still in very early stages of development. Tom played the top-down survival game and said it had "echoes of Ultima Online, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft". It's now in Early Access and developer Unlok has announced that it will add multiplayer in the next update, which should increase its longevity.

The multiplayer will be slightly different, in that everything will happen in real time. Like the main game it will have permadeath by default—or respawning in a Casual mode—and PvP that you can simply toggle on and off.

"Players will be able to join Wayward multiplayer games through their friend's Steam profile, their Steam friends list, or through an in-game menu. There's also several new multiplayer chat commands available, like a handy "/kick" command for players that like to start fires under your feet," said the developer in a Steam post.

The beta update 2.5 will also overhaul the UI, add new lore and fresh crafting materials.

It's currently £5.59/$7.99 on Steam.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.