I don't think MP is getting much attention right now.
I will say, however, that I did ask about the problem with construction in MP and it apparently WAS fixed but it was too late to make it into v1.2 before the code freeze. I've asked for an update for next week to release that fix to the public.
There are two things I want very much but am not sure what the resources around it will be: 1) I really would like to see modding beefed up with actual c++ code provided that developers could recompile into a DLL and 2) I'd like to see multiplayer capabilities expanded such that modders could effectively create their own mp modes.
The thing that holds this back isn't even budget. It's people. There was a talk at GDC by someone at Firaxis that went into this issue that finding Windows networking engineers who can make games is a holy grail issue now. They're just not out there anymore. Good MP code has become complex enough in the past few years that it requires a real specialist and those people are really hard to find and the MMOs have sucked up a lot of the talent pool.
Similarly, finding low level coding architects is very challenging. This is something of an ongoing issue. Nowadays, it's tough to find developers who feel comfortable with making DLLs and passing things around. Thus, it's a specialist.
And while these are two things I could program, I just don't have the available time to do it. That's why in "the old days" our games were more moddable and more MP (The Corporate Machine for instance and GalCiv for OS/2 where the entire game were DLLs with c code where people could make their own invasion modules and Shipyards and such).
Another thing about DLLs is that a lot of the fancy new data classes don't play well with being passed between DLLs. So it requires both a architect developer AND someone who is comfortable with the ins and outs of STL and such.
And of course, against all this is the backdrop that very very few people make use of this. And while I agree with the argument that these things help increase the lifespan of games, it only matters if the big studios also agree with this as they help drive demand for different types of software developer career paths.
We've been aggressively recruiting more developers for months now and the number of qualified people (including recent college grads) is strikingly small. If you're in college, a good career path I think is software engineering. HIGH demand, low supply. It's now wonder things are getting outsourced overseas.
Hope this isn't too boring sounding but that's the sort of mundane stuff that causes design and ideas to fail to come to fruition. As someone who used to do this sort of thing, it's immensely frustrating to design something up and not be able to see it through simply because we lack the people to work on it.
