Multiplayer

My family and I love to play pinball on the ps3 and have eagerly awaited the release of pinball arcade. We actually enjoyed Williams pinball hall of fame so much that we made a trip to the pinball hall of fame in Vegas just to play some of the tables in real life.

Are we missing something in pinball arcade? We can't figure out how to setup multiplayer without passing the controller around the room. In the Williams game we could select number of players and their controller number. We can't figure out how to do this in pinball arcade. Anyone know?

Wow, I didn't realize you could select number of controllers in PHOF.

George Klepacz said:

Wow, I didn't realize you could select number of controllers in PHOF.

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Number of controllers and the port so you could decide the order of play.

I thought I was doing something wrong or something. The wife and I loved to play WHOF so we were ecstatic when I stumbled upon Arcade in PSN. Completely blown away we have to share the same controller. I hope this is getting fixed for the future?

slidebite said:

I thought I was doing something wrong or something. The wife and I loved to play WHOF so we were ecstatic when I stumbled upon Arcade in PSN. Completely blown away we have to share the same controller. I hope this is getting fixed for the future?

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Ok, this sucks but is a little easier than sharing the controller. Start the game using controller one. When it is player two's turn have that person use their own controller by holding the PS button and going into the controller settings. Change that controller to controller one. Once you do this a couple of times you'll be pretty quick with it. In our room its way faster than sharing the controller.

oh god, thanks for the idea but no.. we sit 5' from each other so reaching over and passing while a stupid inconvenience in this day and age is probably less of a hassle.

Better yet, Farsight, fix this. Please!

slidebite said:

oh god, thanks for the idea but no.. we sit 5' from each other so reaching over and passing while a stupid inconvenience in this day and age is probably less of a hassle.

Better yet, Farsight, fix this. Please!

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I did email FarSight and they said they'd add it to the list. They also said that they were having a technical issue with supporting more than one controller so he didn't know when or if they would be able to get to fixing it.

that's just so odd... they were able to support multiple controllers in Williams so well. I hope this is fixed for when the DLC comes along!

slidebite said:

that's just so odd... they were able to support multiple controllers in Williams so well. I hope this is fixed for when the DLC comes along!

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It didn't seem promising. Their reply to me was that they would throw it on the suggestion pile and it would be considered. I'd suggest sending an email to support@pinballarcade.com and requesting multiple controller support.

Thanks for the email address. I'll do that.

If I remember correctly, one of the console makers wanted to fail our PHOF submission because of the way we handled multiple controllers. We had to argue with them to get it approved. We didn't want Pinball Arcade to fail for the same thing.

Really the main issue comes in when you have multiple profiles/users signed in on each controller then you play a game together. The way we did it in PHOF was the main profile (whichever controller pressed start at the start screen) is where the save data was handled. The other profiles were ignored except for achievements. It's really complicated to allow each user to have thier own save during the multiplayer game. I believe this is why they wanted to fail us.

Unfortunatly from my experience (17 titles on just about every platform), I would say 90% of the submission failures are over bugs that 99.9% of the users would never see. We spend more time fixing things like removing memory cards while signing into a profile than I would like. It would be nice if we could spend that time making a better quality game.

Multiple controller support is still on my list.

I don't understand the part about multiple profiles or each controller having its own profile. When we sign into the PSN and play only that profile is used. Everyone is then using the same profile. Just like in PHOF. We don't need multiple profiles, we just don't want to pass the controller around.

It just makes sense to me that since pinball machines are multi-player that their simulations would support multi-player in the same way that other turn based games do like golf. When my family and I play Hot Shots Golf or Planet Mini-Golf we don't have to pass around the controller, we each have our own.

Sorry, I'm less familiar with PS3. On Xbox 360 each controller has it's own profile.

Mike Reitmeyer said:

Sorry, I'm less familiar with PS3. On Xbox 360 each controller has it's own profile.

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Maybe the fix on the PS3 side wouldn't be too difficult then.

Thanks for your 2c Mike. As someone who plays pinball on the PS3 pretty much strictly as multiplayer, it really is an important feature to me and I suspect others. I would actually have a tough time chosing between it and new tables to be honest... and that's saying something!

If there is anything you can recommend the community do to help make it happen, please let us know.

I'm sad to see no action on this thread for months. What a buzzkill to have to to share a controller for such a non-issue. As it's been said above, there's plenty of multiplayer games that don't bother with the issue of account profiles. Turn off trophy support within game for local multiplayer? Add trophies that are specific to trying local multiplayer? But the idea that account handling is the only reason for using one controller amongst friends has got to go.

And please, make it quick and easy to reassign controller numbers between players. If a cheap little game like Puzzle Fighter can get this right, a game I pay for on multiple devices shouldn't leave me apologizing for its design.

brakel said:

Ok, this sucks but is a little easier than sharing the controller. Start the game using controller one. When it is player two's turn have that person use their own controller by holding the PS button and going into the controller settings. Change that controller to controller one. Once you do this a couple of times you'll be pretty quick with it. In our room its way faster than sharing the controller.

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Well... been searching for solution for 2 days... This way (above) is very cumbersome, but was willing to give it a try... UNFORTUNATELY, it does NOT work with the new PS4 Dualshock-4 controllers. Sad.

Merlin777 said:

Well... been searching for solution for 2 days... This way (above) is very cumbersome, but was willing to give it a try... UNFORTUNATELY, it does NOT work with the new PS4 Dualshock-4 controllers. Sad.

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It's actually easier on the PS4. The first person signs in as user X. The second person, when it is his or her turn, hits the PS button on their DS4. When the user menu pops up they select user X. That will turn off the first controller and now the second controller is in use.