The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners Multiplayer | What Would It Look Like?

If you came here wondering if The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners or its sequel The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution have multiplayer, then I’m sorry to tell you that neither of them do. Still, it’s fun to imagine just what those games would be like if they had multiplayer. So here we’re looking into how The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners Multiplayer could look, if it existed.

The Trial Mode: Wave Survival With Friends

With a little guessing it would be simple to imagine that Skydance Interactive would have the easiest time implementing Multiplayer for The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners in its “The Trial” mode. In this mode you fight against twenty waves of increasingly larger amounts of walkers. You can buy more weapons, supplies, and ammunition using coins that you get for defeating the walkers. It’s a lot of fun, but can get kind of repetitive on your own.

So what if there was an option to include another player in the fun? This could become like a VR version of Call of Duty’s Zombies mode, or a better version of Contractor’s zombies survival mode, which we’ve been on record here saying isn’t too great.

Blasting waves of zombies with a buddy or two is tried and true fun, and you wouldn’t need to change how The Trial functions much to accommodate more players (outside of the obvious technical difficulties with adding multiplayer to something made for singleplayer.) Each player would probably want their own bank of cash to spend on upgrades and weapons, which also adds a bit of competition over who can kill walkers the best and the fastest for more points.

Also the difficulty would definitely have to go up, even adding some of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinner’s human enemies might make the game spicy enough to help overcome the new advantage in numbers that the players would have. At the very least there would need to be greater amounts of walkers, which might also create a challenge with how well the Quest 2 could handle that amount of enemies in the game at the same time. Maybe making resources more scarce would balance things out. Regardless of how it would be done, Multiplayer The Trial sounds like fun.

If you’re looking for something like a Multiplayer version of The Trial or a better type of wave based zombie survival than Contractors offers, check out Requisition VR, they’ve got a pretty good wave based zombie defense mode that is also multiplayer. It’s getting better all the time too, and at the time of writing this is planned to come to the Oculus Quest platform soon.

Scavenging New Orleans as a Team

A multiplayer version of The Trial would be great, no doubt about that, but I think what everyone would really want is something that hasn’t been done before, and is a multiplayer version of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners’ and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution’s main campaign. Exploring New Orleans with your friends, fighting through Tower strongholds, chopping through walkers, scavenging bits and pieces for your Resting Place. That is the Multiplayer The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners experience that would be like no other.

Before the release of Chapter 2: Retribution I might have said that the game would be too easy with a team of buddies at your side, but with a few tweaks I think the difficulty of the sequel, especially when exploring at night, would be more spot on, and still keep the tension that Saints & Sinners has in spades and uses so well in its gameplay.

Of course it would have to be harder if you have more people playing together. Luckily Chapter 2: Retribution has shown that the Quest 2 can handle a large amount of walkers and enemies. Increasing the amount of enemies you and your friends face would be crucial to maintaining tension, and some enhancements to the human enemy AI would also be welcome, with or without multiplayer.

Even with the existing amount of enemies there are some great new possibilities with multiple people. Maybe a mission where both of you need to go to different spots on the map to complete an objective, and then fight through Tower grunts to find each other again and escape. Having multiple players means that the weapons each player brings could be more specialized, with some focusing on ranged weapons and some on melee.

Of course that would only matter if the carrying capacity of each player was reduced, or everyone would be as versatile as they would be in singleplayer, or maybe not, maybe each player keeping their versatility is more fun. At the very least seeing how everyone plays the game differently would be fantastic.

Still, at the very least health should be reduced with more people. The Tourist is already very hard to kill, having four tourists with the same amount of health means that they probably wouldn’t even need to use guns. Instead you could just bumrush everything with melee weapons. That would be the most important aspect of multiplayer for The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, balancing the amount of enemies and the strength of the players so that neither side is too powerful.

One player could draw in a horde of walkers, while another waits to shoot a propane tank or throw an explosive to destroy them all. One player could shoot at some Tower soldiers while another sneaks up behind them to chop them to bits with a katana. This makes existing missions in these games more interesting, but would also leave a lot of room for making even more intricate and dangerous missions.

Your friend could die and you could loot their backpack and bring their weapons back to the Resting Place for them. Maybe Player versus Player could be an interesting place to take The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners multiplayer. A raid system like there is in games like Escape From Tarkov or Marauders could be very interesting. Basically you would go out into New Orleans to scavenge and complete objectives as usual, but other players could fight and kill you while you do that.

If each player dropped all of their equipment on death, like the exiles in Chapter 2: Retribution, this would mean that extra players wouldn’t make the game easier, but would actually create a whole new threat and incredible danger. There is yet to be a good extraction shooter in Virtual Reality on PCVR or the Quest 2.

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners as a multiplayer game could fit this emerging multiplayer shooter market incredibly well. Regardless of whether it would be a Player Versus Player or purely Cooperative game, it would be a blast. Maybe we’ll see The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners Multiplayer one day, for now we can only dream.