Over the Hill and Playing With Friends

We’re back with Over the Hill, this time to look at multiplayer.  Unlike past Funselektor titles, Over the Hill will let you play with other people.

Over the Hill

As I mentioned last time, I poked Potshot about grabbing Over the Hill after I had just a couple of hours invested.  It seemed like our kind of thing, a simple, open world driving game fraught with the possibility of disaster that tends to lead to comedy.

He obliged by buying in on Steam, at which point we had to figure out how to join up.

Over the Hill has the most simple of multiplayer modes, which I think is mostly enabled by Steam.  But that is fine.  This isn’t a game that needs a hosted server with a persistent world or anything.  There is no procedurally generated content or seed values that make one person’s play through differ from another’s.

In fact, hosting a game, or joining somebody else’s game, changes nothing about your own game or progress.  When you arrive your profile arrives with you with your map reveals, your vehicle selection and upgrades and cosmetics in place, and your pebble balance as before.

It is almost weirdly simple.  It highlighted to me that there is only one play mode and, aside from the ability to reset everything to the default, no profile options at all.  I am not sure you NEED profiles, but it might be a future feature to have one where you unlock the world together with someone while having your own world where you have raced ahead and done stuff.

But, for the sake of simplicity, that isn’t a thing.  I’d rather have the game now than in another year with a built-out profile manager.

Anyway, multiplayer is right there on the options when you log into the game.

It is the second option

When you select that you can then join a public server, there is a list of them available, or a private server, for which you need a code.

Or you can create your own server.  For our first attempt I did that.

Create Server Options

I am not sure about the desirability of creating a public server, but you can do it if you want.  For our first venture I created a private server.  Then, once I figured out where the code was, shared that with Potshot who joined my game.

We’re in the lobby

From there you enter the game by picking where on the map you want to start, with all your currently discovered cabins available, and then you’re in.

At which point the game is pretty much the same as single player, except now there is somebody else driving around in the world with you.  As noted, you arrive as you were in your single player session.

There is no in-game chat. Given how many other titles have shown up without chat as a feature in the last decade, this is no longer a surprise.  And from a small company for a controller focused game that is going to appear on consoles it probably was a stretch in any case.

However, there is already an in-game chat mod.  I haven’t fiddled with mods yet, but there is a mod browser right there in the main menu.  Seems easy enough.

When you are together in the game you can see each other when close by, naturally.  You also get a marker on your compass at the top of the screen that indicates what direction the other person is relative to your current position.  You can also see the pins each of you drop on the map… you can drop a navigational pin on the map to help guide you through the wilderness… which are color coded so you can tell one pin from the other.

Potshot ahead, icon on the compass

We got on voice and did a quick compare of where we had both been so far.  There is no map sharing, not yet, but through vague descriptions, pin drops, and an occasional screen shot paste into Discord, we came up with a plan.  I had seen a meteorite down near the southeast corner of the map… finding meteorites is also a thing with Over The Hill, which seems a little random, but who cares if it give you something else to do… but had not gone to inspect it, so we figured we would head down that way.

The first destination was the cabin nearby, Malachite Lodge, which would give us fast travel.  However, for the initial trip we would have to go cross country, with no trail marked, and through the snow.

That included a detour to a point of interest which ended up with my Blazer under water and stalled, needing to be winched back to dry land.

Blazer under water

At that point it was only raining.  The weather turned to snow shortly thereafter and lasted for a bit, then the sky turned clear.  We managed to make it to the cabin, go back for the meteorite, then looked around at what else we could do.

There was a point of interest on a ridge close by, which we went for in the night.  I swapped from the Blazer, which I had been trying out, back to the Scout, which was my most upgraded vehicle.  I wanted the better tires and taller suspension and winch with the longer reach.  These are all things you can buy from Crazy Gunther with the pebbles you get as rewards.

That climb was a bit of a struggle, with some winch work required, as well as being the first lesson in needing to approach boulders just right in order to get over them.  But we made it up with only a few falls.

At the top of the ridge

You can see the purple smoke from my map pin.  Map pins manifest themselves in the world as a smoking flare of the appropriate color.  The point of interest had a crate which unlocked the longhorns cosmetic that can be attached to the hood of your vehicle.

We then fast traveled back to the cabin and decided to take on the challenge trail that was close by.  It had begun to snow again, but we were not daunted.  Off we went.

This was the third of the three challenge trails on the Emerald Lake map.  The first, Elizabeth Oath Trail, is basically a lesson in how to follow a challenge trail, something I failed on my first attempt because I did not see the big, obvious waypoint marker because I somehow approached from the wrong direction.

Later I figured out my mistake and ran the trail.  It is easy.  I have done it with the Blazer in high gear at speed since then.  You end up at a nice waterfall and collect some pebbles as a reward.  You get rewarded every time you run a challenge trail.

The second trail, the Windy Joe Trail, is a bit more of a challenge, but still feels a bit introductory.

And then there is the Hermit Trail, the third challenge trail on the map, when you actually graduate to the “challenge” part of the name.  We started out in the snow up the first big slope, which was a too steep to go straight up, so it required winch work, using the terrain, correct approaches on boulders, and a bit of luck.  Mishaps occurred as we worked our way up that first slope.

Potshot down the hill

I don’t think the snow was helping, though I am not sure how much weather influences tire adhesion.  You can see the winch point one of us planted to help us get up an open stretch of the slope.  You can only carry a limited number of those… I think we both had two… but you can use the winch points others put down, so traveling as group gives you some advantage.

It was during this climb up the Hermit Trail that I started to really explore Photo Mode.

There on the pause menu

You don’t actually pause the game with multiplayer, but that is the title on the menu.

What Photo Mode does is give you a camera view unlocked from your vehicle so you can navigate around and see things from different angles.  This let me keep an eye on how Potshot was doing if I got a bit ahead of him.

Split level view of our climb

That particular corner and climb up the washboard was a challenge.  I got up it because Potshot pushed me, then had to go back to the top of it to help with some more winch work.

Photo Mode is pretty awesome, to the point of being a bit of a cheat I guess, because you can really get a view of what is going on.  The camera moves around slowly, so you wouldn’t want to try to “drive” the map with it.  Any vehicle in low range would be faster.

Anyway, we kept on up the trail, making our way slowly.

Not actually photo mode in this pic

There were all sorts of challenges and reinforcement of early lessons about things like your angle of approach being very important when climbing boulders.

Sometimes your approach is everything

There were more moments of comedy as we tried to get over various obstacles, figuring out the hard way what was going to work and what was going to end up with somebody stuck on a rock.  But with two people you have more options.  It opens up the game.  So we carried on to the top.

Up through more gravel and rock

As we arrived at the final waypoint and finished the trail I mentioned that this was my second run, that I had done it solo before.  Potshot wondered if that made the whole thing like pulling teeth, but I had to strongly disagree.

Playing co-op, getting together to take on obstacles is actually more fun.  You have more options and can actually engage in some actual cooperative game play.

Having wrapped that up, we were closing in on finishing all the objectives on the Emerald Lake map.  We spent some time exploring dark areas on the map until we found the final points of interest, then took the ferry to Gimli Ridge, the next area of the game.

Now we have some new challenge trails to find.