Games
We speak to the mod team reinvigorating Medici with massive multiplayer mayhem.
Just Cause 3, Avalanche Studio’s latest tropical romp, is filled with plenty of explosions and captivating wingsuit moments that are great to share with your mates. Aside from video replays, Twitch streaming, yelling “Xbox, record that” at your console or just having your best buds next to you, actually sharing those ridiculous feats in the game with your pals has been a bit difficult, however; it’s a strictly single player game.
With Rockstar Games blazing forward with GTA Online, letting you share that huge open world with your online mates, we’ve been left scratching our heads as to why Avalanche has missed out on that multiplayer trick in their latest Just Cause game. Enter Nanos GbR, a small team based around the world with members in Austria, Germany and the UK, who are taking it upon themselves to turn Just Cause 3 into a multiplayer haven with their mod, filled with possibly hundreds of players, wingsuit races, grappling hooks and more explosions than you could imagine.
We spoke with the team behind the ambitious PC mod, what their goals are for it and how building their own multiplayer framework could let them bring large scale multiplayer to other games in the future.
Modding a recent AAA game and adding an exhaustive array of multiplayer functions to it sounds incredibly ambitious, but that’s exactly what the Nanos team is doing, and have been doing for years, as the team has made multiplayer mods for GTA IV and Mafia 2. The 11-strong team, with members around the world, are hard at work on their latest project: turning Just Cause 3 into a multiplayer sandbox with hundreds of Ricos hookshotting around the island of Medici all at once. The team takes the time to work over the internet to ensure everything gets done – and it’s an impressive labour of love.
Some of the team work on the mod in their spare time, while others spend the equivalent to a full-time job coding everything that makes the mod run smoothly: head developer Alexander Güttler tells RedBull.com he works on the mod almost all the time, alongside other work – and it’s not surprising considering the scale and scope of the operation. Just don’t confuse it with the other Just Cause 3 multiplayer mod, created by the same guys who made the original Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod, which has recently ceased development as the lead developer has been hired by Avalanche.
“I’m working on it pretty much the same amount of time as a full-time job – I work every day on the mod alongside normal work,” Güttler tells us. “It’s more part time for some of us though, but it’s still a lot more than just a hobby,” Malte Scholz, CEO of Nanos and head of legal, explains, as not all the team members are equipped to work on it 24/7.
The ambitious team got the band together a few years ago, working on multiplayer mod projects for GTA IV and Mafia 2 before the Just Cause 3 mod, which they began in earnest in the middle of December 2015. All of the work they have done on previous mods have led up to this point, and has helped shape the way the team is working today, Scholz says. “There was a point where we all met together and started some projects and after some time, other developers applied to our team and that’s basically how it went. Step by step the team grew, and we got to the point where we started to develop the Nanos framework.”
That framework the team is creating serves as the backend for the Just Cause 3 multiplayer mod, and it’s not made just for Just Cause either – it’ll enable the team to deploy the same kind of multiplayer functionality to future games too, a backbone of sorts to then build upon – we can imagine the team working more multiplayer magic into the likes of Mafia 3 or even The Elder Scrolls series in the future.
“So a few years ago we did a multiplayer mod for GTA IV too, although that didn’t end too well. Some issues in the engine were not that easy to deal with, so in the end, it just took too long and we stopped the project. After that, we decided to work on GTA V – even though it wasn’t released at the time yet, we decided to prepare some basic stuff for that like scripting and server basics and graphics rendering, which we need,” Güttler tells us, with those basic elements serving as the backbone for what would be their framework.
“That is when we got in touch with the Mafia 2 multiplayer developer, AaronLad as he’s known, and he was quite happy to join us and work together on that,” he explains. “Although last November, we got contacted by Take-Two [GTA series publisher], who sent private investigators to my door, and another project leader at the time, telling us we had to stop as it was apparently a threat to their GTA Online business.”
The work the team had done on the backend for GTA IV and Mafia 2 enabled them to make their Nanos framework.
Still, all of that work wasn’t for nothing; even if Take Two’s lawyers wanted to put a stop to it: the work the team had done on the backend for GTA IV and Mafia 2 enabled them to make their Nanos framework, which they could apply to their next project, which was to be decided by their devoted fans.
“We then decided to ask the community for their help in deciding a new project, which was chosen as Just Cause 3. We got in touch with developer Avalanche and Square Enix and we got full permission to do the mod, so we don’t have to fear being shut down again – they’re actually quite interested in what we’re doing, and they’re following our progress, which is really nice compared to what Take Two has done.”
“They look at our progress and comment on stuff, and share things on Twitter,” Güttler adds. “And at the moment, they actually want to try it out when we make something more public.”
“We share some internal videos and screenshots with them and they’re really excited to see where it’s going,” Dennis Schlotterbeck, marketing manager and designer for Nanos, tells us.
Modding such a wide range of games sounds like a tall order; they all run on different engines and are made by different developers, but it’s the backend Nanos framework the team has been working on that makes it a lot easier for them to change from game to game – parts are already written and can be reused in other games, even if they don’t share any similarities at all.
“While the framework itself isn’t fully finished itself, we have a framework-like system in place right now which has made it really easy to transition from GTA V to Just Cause 3 because most parts are already written and we can reuse them in really any game we want – our end goal is to have more flexibility in that and provide each system separately so any developer can use it to make a mod or a game company who wants to implement multiplayer in their game or whatever, so that’s what we’re working towards with our Just Cause 3 mod, and of course, to expand the game and have fun and do crazy stuff with the game,” Güttler explains.
Fun is the main aim here, even though Just Cause 3 by itself has plenty of entertaining set pieces, it’s still a lonely affair, even if the game lends itself almost perfectly to a multiplayer experience – which is why Nanos is doing exactly what they’re doing.
“We think it’s a lot of fun,” Schlotterbeck exclaims when describing the fruits of their labour.
It’s so much fun and you share your experience by playing with friends, and it’s definitely something else!
“It’s so much fun and you share your experience by playing with friends, and it’s definitely something else! It’s so much different to if you’re playing by yourself and there’s nothing like it really,” says Güttler.
“Like just doing a wingsuit race against time is kinda boring, but when you have a real wingsuit race against real players over the internet, it’s way more fun. It’s a lot more enjoyable, and it gets a lot more competitive too,” Scholz tells us.
“And that’s just the start: it's not only about wingsuit races, you can do real races with cars, we’re looking forward to the first roleplaying servers and all that kind of stuff, which is part of our idea and this framework,” says Güttler.
The team isn’t interested in creating a one-stop mod that has all the bells and whistles already included – they want to create the basis for the fans to then take control: Nanos will provide the elements needed to run the multiplayer mod on a server, and then it’s over to the community to tailor those servers to how they want to play. That means you might eventually find servers that cater only in racing games, or others that want to take a more serious take and deliver roleplaying, much like those found in MMORPG titles – and the team tells us it’s quite simple for server hosts to tailor the mod to their needs.
“It’s really easy as we just provide like, a server, and a script you can modify with JavaScript, and you can change practically everything on the server,” Güttler explains. “You can create different rooms, start races, spawn objects for different players, and so on, so you can have different races with ramps and all of that stuff. We’re going provide in the beginning gametypes like deathmatch and racing, and users can then write their own game modes however they want – they have full freedom to do what they want to do. We want to provide the users with the possibility creating their own world within the JC3 multiplayer mod, and how they want to do it.”
“We want to update the mod regularly with improvements too. For example, at the moment it’s not quite possible to sync NPCs [non-playable characters; quest givers for example], to each player which requires some logic on the server which we currently don’t have, and we don’t really want to run the game on the server side, because it’s generally tricky to make it happen, but it’s something we want to work on in the future,” Güttler explains. “But our goal for now is to get the basic multiplayer experience out and then expand on that, with like, possible AI in the future, replacing content, adding vehicles, adding objects to the game, maybe even full conversion maps – importing New York City, for example. These are all just ideas we want to work on in the future. We want to give players that freedom for them to do whatever they want, it's our idea to our dedicated server system.
“This is also the concept for our system that people will be able to script in JavaScript, and are able to create powerful game modes and it’s about their imagination and what kind of game mode they want to create in the game,” Scholz expands. “They can create a deathmatch game mode or a roleplaying game mode or a racing game mode, or all together, and that’s where we don’t have to focus. We focus on providing engine side systems to make them accessible for scripters in the end.”
With the mod still in internal testing and not yet released to the wider public, the team isn’t quite sure what the limits are yet – and that makes for some tantalising player numbers, which will surely equal some ridiculous possibilities: “We don’t know the player cap at the moment! We think it’s around a hundred,” says Güttler. “We have to decide that when we get to the public game tests, and how many players are actually working on the server – we don’t know what the engine can handle yet, and it’s yet to be decided, but we believe it’s going to be over a hundred, definitely.”
“It’s quite playable at the moment, we have already released some videos and there are of course, some bugs that need to be fixed, but most of the features we want for the first release are basically done right now,” Güttler tells us. “It’s mostly just polishing or small bug fixes at the moment.”
The team is hard at work to hit a launch for the mod later this year, and while it’s currently playable for hours without crashing (which is a good thing, Güttler assures us), there’s still plenty to be done, The team is proud of where it’s got to so far, however, even if there have been plenty of headaches along the way.
“Spawning stuff was actually quite hard – harder than I thought. Actually spawning a vehicle is a lot more difficult that it actually sounds! You have to find out ‘how do you load the model to actually make this appear in the game?’, and then ‘how do I check if the model is actually loaded’, and then ‘how do I create the instance of that vehicle I want to spawn?’. It took a lot longer than I initially thought it would take, and I think I managed it after 14 hours straight working on it,” Güttler explains.
What was the first thing he spawned? “It was a tank!” he exclaims. Of course. “I was really happy that worked. It was like 5am in the morning and I was so happy – I was so close to giving up for the night, and then I got it working. It was unbelievable.”
While spawning tanks in typical Just Cause style is exciting enough, getting actual core features of the game working is equally thrilling for the team. “The most exciting things are always when you get a new feature synchronised,” Güttler tells us. “So when we first got players synchronised, then vehicles, then parachutes, wingsuits, grappling hooks and so on, that’s a really satisfying feeling – especially after you’ve been working on that for a long time. That made up for all the hard work that goes behind it, for me.”
With the team working hard on the mod, getting it ready for a public test and crushing bugs, the Nanos team is looking forward to releasing it later this year. “While we don’t know when exactly, we want to say we’ll release it this year. We can’t say an exact date, but we’re looking forward to releasing it in 2016,” Schlotterbeck tells us. “It’s awesome, and we are excited to see how the community will react to it.”
And we can’t wait either – we thought one Rico running around Medici, blowing stuff up was impressive, but hundreds sounds even better. Sign us right up.
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