Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is a sequel to an indie game called Space Pirates and Zombies from 2011. Right now the sequel’s been in Early Access for about a year, but it would seem that the developers of the game have been having some trouble behind the scenes and because of it a much anticipated gamemode has had to fall by the wayside.

Developers MinMax Games put out a post on their Steam community page recently that broke the news to the game’s community that unfortunately the planned multiplayer arena mode has had to be scrapped, along with a lengthy apology for having done it. The problem it seems that is due to a lack of multiplayer backend functionality in the Unity game engine that they’re building the game in, they just can’t get Arena to work as well as they feel good releasing with the game. They state that they “have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4. But at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.”

As mentioned, many players were really looking forward to the multiplayer and had even hoped that the game might one day get a co-op campaign mode too. Needless to say, the scrapping of Arena has kind of nipped those hopes in the bud. It does seem though that the majority of players have taken the news well, with most of the responses to the post being quite positive and a number of players saying that they have respect for MinMax’s honesty with them about the state of the game and the now-dropped feature. Always nice to see people on the Internet acting rationally for once.

If you’re curious about the game though, you can pick up Space Pirates and Zombies 2 right now from the Steam store for $19.99/£14.99.