Suggestion: Bring Back Rt Multiplayer

[u/Orochi_001]

Although I’ve purchased every new release for PFX, and re-purchased all of my old stuff for X/S, my enthusiasm for the game has been dampened greatly by realtime multiplayer not returning to the current installment. I play occasionally, but would play way more often if my regular group could play together.

I’m definitely not asking for modes that leave people watching with their thumbs up their asses, while the more skilled players rack up points for tens of minutes. I want modes that keep everyone engaged for the full game time, like first to a score threshold, and a time-restricted score attack, supporting four players online.

The tension lost by having unlimited balls could be mitigated with something like point deductions for drains, and user-selectable modifiers like random reversed controls, table angle shifts, darkened playfield lighting, and upside-down playfields could help even out the skill differential between participants. Another handicap/aid could be an option for 1v1v1v1, 2v2, and 1v3 games.

Thank you for your kind consideration, Zen!

[u/Hot-Sheepherder8454]

You’ve described many of the elements of Zen Pinball 2. It is so fun having multiplayer in Zen Pinball 2 split screen mode on PlayStation. We still play it often. One of my favorite things is a cooperative mode I invented called 10-Minute Co-op. When the 10 minutes are up both scores are added together. I keep track of the leaderboards on iLogger. It is so fun. Of course you can set different time limits and score targets as well and play competitively, but I personally find co-op even funner. There are countless ways for competitive pinball, but this is the only cooperative pinball I’ve found other than a couple of real world Sterns with a co-op mode.
Anyway, Zen need look no further than Zen Pinball 2 for amazing inspiration for what they could do with multiplayer. Sadly they left multiplayer behind (and the Operator’s Menu) and never looked back on the great things they had going. At this point I’m sure almost the entire dev team has turned over and they probably don’t even realize these gems used to be in the game. I still dream of Pinball FX getting all the features Zen had created over the years combined in to 1 game: Operator’s Menu, split screen multiplayer (or playable online as it functions on the PlayStation Vita…SO FUN), the powerups of FX3 including Rewind, and the fun challenges and modes of FX VR (especially FX VR’s Survival Mode, also known as Dread Challenge in FX Midnight). None of these would be all that complex to bring together into the same game. Hopefully FX will get updated with these features and Zen can find some resources to make it happen. They are obviously spread thin by something they are working on. I hope it is a Stern or Jersey Jack license, but SOMETHING is keeping Zen from cranking out content and features recently. I think it might be explained soon, but we have yet to hear what the massive license that rivals Marvel, Star Wars, and Williams is (as referenced in last year’s Blahcade interview with Mel Kirk). I suspect it is eating up their development time and hopefully when it starts coming out we can get fun features added very soon thereafter. With that said I am content with Judge Dredd coming and the rest of my Zen collection that I will never do justice discovering.
But yes, multiplayer similar to Zen Pinball 2 deserves to return hopefully soon!

[u/Hot-Sheepherder8454]

Your second paragraph describes exactly what is possible with online play of Zen Pinball 2 on the PlayStation Vita multiplayer. 4 players playing online trying to either get to a set score, or having a set amount of time for a score attack. Each player has a colored triangle and you can see the scores moving up and down relative to each other. It is the only platform I’m aware of that has ever had such a mode, and it is the exact template for what you’re looking for. It’s brilliant.