I don’t love Max Payne 3, but one thing is very good in it: it’s the only thing I’ve seen go out of its way to make player-activated bullet-time work in multiplayer non-jankily. It takes a pretty cool approach, where slow motion gets propagated between players and objects based on line of sight to the slomo-affected things, and it works flawlessly. Here are some thoughts about that.
Back in the day I was on Max Payne fan forums on sites like “Max Payne Headquarters”, and I remember long debates about how Max Payne multiplayer with bullet-time could possibly work. I don’t think many people in there really knew anything about game dev and you definitely had a few of those weirdos who just pretend they do, but most folks thought it’d never work. There were games that sort of did it, like Action Half-Life or The Specialists or (a bit later) FEAR, but they just modified the global time dilation. It was fun, but it meant that if a player in the lobby of a tall building activated bullet time for a fight, the one player alone on the roof would also get slomo.
In Max Payne 3’s multiplayer, they do something fairly elaborate and also flawless, which is that a player can activate slomo, and any player who can see, or be seen by, anything that is currently slomo’d, also gets the slomo. Otherwise, they stay normal speed. So this means that in the example below, if players 2 and 3 are fighting in slow motion, player 1 is still at regular speed. But if 1 rounds the corner, everyone is in slomo. Or if player 3 shoots the barrel, it explodes in slow motion, because 1 and 2 can see it, and now player 1 is now in slow motion too, because 1 can see the barrel, which is in slow motion.
Or if a grenade gets thrown at the crate, and explodes, and bits of the crate go flying into player 1’s FOV, player 1 is now in slow motion, because the slow motion players can see the crate gibs, and so can player 1.
This pretty much works perfectly and the result is a super cool, dramatic multiplayer experience. You’ll be walking through a bar at normal speed when a player suddenly crashes through the skylight in slow motion, at an advantage because they expected the slow motion, and you suddenly have to dive for cover, a better translation to video game of that type of film than you’ll see anywhere else. Anyway, it’s a great solve, and the only time I’ve seen it attempted. There are some interesting gameplay implications as well – a sniper hiding in an upper-floor window might activate their bullet-time right before they take a shot, and the way that looks to the victim is “suddenly I’m in slomo for no reason”, which gets to be an “oh shit, hit the deck” situation you rarely manage an escape from.
When I tweeted these thoughts back in 2021, I got some DMs (which aren’t in the archive for whatever reason, so I only have my vague memories about it) from someone who worked on it (or with it). We talked about how much better this would have been to have in Red Dead Online (for Dead Eye) than the non-slomo situation they wound up going with, and how RDR2 just has too many extra considerations for that to work – the main one being too many gameplay-relevant objects that would need to propagate the slomo (birds, animals, trains) and too many wide-open spaces where you’d need to propagate the slomo into spaces where it was not gameplay-relevant, or risk things looking goofy from a distance.
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