Hey Survivors! Well, it's been a while. But there has been a lot underway behind on the scenes on the Outbreak series since the launch of Outbreak: Epidemic on Xbox One and Steam! One of the most demanded features across all of the co-op titles in the series is local co-op. I'm happy to announce it's in active development and nearing completion on PC (and then will be coming to consoles in some form in the future) for Outbreak: The New Nightmare. I'll be looking into other titles in the series in the future to see what can happen there, but that will be a discussion for another time.
Although Outbreak: The New Nightmare was a co-op title from day one, online multiplayer and local co-op are two very different beasts. I've found a way to balance the requirements and add proper support, as well as upgrade the underlying engine to the latest version. This local co-op is only possible due to the massive performance upgrades I was able to achieve in the last round of major patching. That being said, you will need a beefy rig to run local co-op on fully maxed out settings and high resolution. So let's talk about it!

Local Co-op Overview

Local co-op in Outbreak: The New Nightmare covers all game modes, characters and functionality. The main player and your partner are equal in terms of abilities and the opportunity to level up. You'll be using characters from the master Steam account of the owner of the title, but each character will continue to level up independently and you can apply perks just as you can online or in single-player.
Local co-op is accessible via the "Local Game" menu (replacing the Single-player menu). This menu still allows you to launch offline single-player games, but now there is a toggle to enable co-op and pick the character of your local co-op player. You can also fully customize your keyboard, mouse and gameplay controls for both players in the options menu.
When you're in-game in local co-op, you'll get an EXP bar for each player and you can track leveling up through that. You can also see both people's inventories at the same time through the lobby screen - although for now only one player can use their inventory at a time. In future updates, I hope to continue to improve this, but the UI code for The New Nightmare is old and wasn't written with extensibility like this in mind.
I'm really excited for this feature to be on the way. I've definitely heard the community feedback and I'm very excited to get it into both PC and console versions as soon as it's possible. Stay tuned for updates! It's coming soon! As always, good luck surviving!