Old school gaming: coop multiplayer LAN
February 14, 2019 7:36 PM   Subscribe

So I realise this is an incredibly dated question. I have a friend that I game with over a LAN. We play cooperative games like Civ. However (gasp) I am getting bored with Civ. What else is there?

We have also played and enjoyed: Neverwinter Nights, Diablo II and various FPS like Hexen etc - however FPS tend to make me motion sick so they're out. I am also not mad about platform games as I tend to be pretty dismal at coordination-type things like jumping onto moving platforms etc.

What else is there? I have searched previous AskMes but they all seem really dated and I'm hoping there's something else out there now.

I am not opposed to playing something with an online server (vs a LAN) as long as it's possible to create a local game that is limited to just the two of us. I do not want to be interacting with the world at large, which is my understanding of a lot of other persistent world multiplayer gaming.
posted by Athanassiel to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (11 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: My husband and I enjoyed Divinity: Original Sin and have just started Divinity: Original Sin 2, both of which have co-op modes. In the first case it's for two players; I'm not sure if the sequel allows more players. They're both fantasy RPGs. The first one has a fairly standard plot, but I enjoyed the humor and the turn-based tactics in the combat--lots of status effects, elemental damage and resistances, etc. that you have to deploy or allow for in an intelligent fashion.
posted by yhlee at 7:45 PM on February 14, 2019


Best answer: Don't Starve Together. Terraria and Starbound are somewhat platform games, but not that bad.
posted by Radiophonic Oddity at 9:26 PM on February 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Minecraft is first-person, but I also have nausea issues with shooters and Minecraft generally doesn't bother me. The modded game is much more complex than vanilla and there's a lot of things one can potentially do with a friend, if you're inclined towards exploration or building kind of gaming and not all combat. (There's some combat, it's just not very technically complex. But I love building stuff with friends.) Playing over a LAN has much easier setup than hosting a real server, for multiplayer.

Diablo 3 kinda sucked at the beginning but after updates got pretty good and while it does involve playing on their servers, you can just play with your friend, you don't have to play with strangers or whatever. Not that there's anything wrong with still playing 2, but if you wanted some variety.
posted by Sequence at 10:33 PM on February 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I like all of the games made by Paradox studies: strategy games like civ, where you move units on a big map, but way awesomer. The different games usually cover different periods in time, usually in great detail.
posted by os tuberoes at 4:11 AM on February 15, 2019


Best answer: They're probably very dated now, but in addition to the ones you mentioned my siblings and I used to play Age of Empires I, II, and III, Age of Mythology, Rise of Nations, Lords of the Realm II, Shogun/Medieval Total War, Baldur's Gate I and II, and Arcanum over our home LAN.

A couple years ago we tried to recreate sibling game night now that we all live hours apart and are adults. We played Divinity: Original Sin, which was great for our purposes, for a couple of weeks, but then it fizzled as college/grad school/new job/new baby took up more time.
posted by abeja bicicleta at 4:15 AM on February 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


Best answer: If you like Civ you will probably enjoy Stellaris. I have played co-op with friends over the internet with one of us acting as the host, so it should work over a LAN.
posted by exogenous at 5:29 AM on February 15, 2019


Best answer: Factorio! Particularly if you like the base-building aspects of Civ. Don't let the early access label put you off, it's fully playable now.
posted by Nelson at 8:28 AM on February 15, 2019


My husband and kids like to play Planets Nu (aka VGA Planets).
posted by alathia at 8:37 AM on February 15, 2019


Best answer: If you liked Diablo 2, you may want to take a look at Torchlight 2. It has the same dev team as Diablo 2 and in many ways is a more polished version of D2. It has co-op multiplayer, which I once tried with a friend that seemed to work fine.

(Disclaimer: I don't do multiplayer, so I'm extrapolating from the single-player game (which is excellent) and the dev team.)
posted by suetanvil at 10:05 AM on February 15, 2019


Welp this seems to be much more old-school than you were thinking but Spaceward Ho! is a twentieth-century 4X game... I mention it not because the game itself was especially notable or captivating but because the way its LAN multiplayer mode worked was by saving a file on a network drive that every player's computer had access to.

So presumably that sort of mechanism could work over something like a Dropbox or other cloud share, and hence perhaps looking for turn-based games employing the same mechanism would help you narrow down your search and help find multi-player games of the sort you're looking for which have persisted to the present day.
posted by XMLicious at 10:38 AM on February 15, 2019


Response by poster: Thanks to all who responded, great suggestions! We've started playing Divinity: Original Sin which is going to take a while to get through and is definitely the kind of thing I was looking for. I am keen to check out some of the others too but there is only limited gaming time available. Still it is nice to be spoiled for choice!
posted by Athanassiel at 9:01 PM on March 17, 2019


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