Ashen expands on Journey’s passive multiplayer by turning real strangers into companions

Not many games have featured the subtle, passive cooperative multiplayer that players first experience in Thatgamecompany’s Journey on the PlayStation 3. But at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow in Los Angeles, developer Aurora44 is demonstrating how it is building on that idea with its new game.

Ashen is an open-world adventure with a focus on exploration, combat, and discovery, and in a demo at Microsoft’s E3 booth, the studio explained that it also wants to give players a personal relationship with both strangers and the NPCs in the world. To accomplish that, it’s is borrowing the passive multiplayer from Journey, which couples up strangers at random without enabling you to speak. That’s opposed to a co-op mode where you actively team up with a friend or the game match-makes you in a lobby.