I'm playing with a number of different game modes, but the big multiplayer place where I want to end up is escape-room puzzles.

You're competing with another person to unlock a door and get out of the level. The moment you unlock that door and step through, you win, no matter when you are on the timeline. And different events and pieces of the level either become available at different points on the timeline, or are linked to meta-time so that they can persist between resets.

This means that killing someone is not always advantageous - you might prefer to leave someone in the future without a method to kill themselves so that you can accomplish an objective in the past without them bothering you. You also might want to avoid getting killed if you know you need to do something at 3 minutes into the level. Going back to the start means you now have to wait for that event.

The temptation when thinking about time travel is to focus on the cause and effect parts of it, but that's not really what Reset Hard is about - it's about learning to think of the timeline as if it's a physical space you can traverse to get different vantage points.

So one of the weapons I'm going to be playing with is the temporal sniper rifle. The first time you pull the trigger it marks when you shoot. The second time you pull the trigger it marks where you shoot. This means you can pull the trigger once, wait a minute for someone to exit a room, and then shoot them from the future into the past. The cause and effect is really weird for that, but it feels more natural when you start thinking of "when" as being just another form of "where." This means that getting ahead of other people on the timeline is a big advantage when you're using the gun.

Or in regards to reverse doors, which are doors that are open before you unlock them, but not after - getting to a late enough point in the level before you unlock them means you have more space in the past to use the door.

So a scenario might be, "you open a reverse door in the future, then travel back in time and use it to get into a separate section of the level. It closes behind you, separating you from another player and allowing you to complete an objective in peace. While you're doing that, the other player travels forward into the future and completes a different objective. They pick up a temporal sniper rifle and pull the trigger as you walk out of the door, then they shoot themselves, reset, and snipe you from the past, forcing you to reset and preventing you from completing the future objective they just finished. They go through the door in the past and lock you out, completing the past objective while you wait for the future objective to become available, then they shoot themselves to reset and walk out of the level, winning."

By prioritizing an early objective instead of a later objective, you put yourself in a situation where the second player could block you off from completing the entire level.

In regards to dominant strategies, yeah, there's a ton of risk for that, and that's why I'm being so public with development. I basically plan to play-test the heck out of everything so that it doesn't devolve into one or two "correct" ways to win. But the short answer is that there's stuff to do throughout the entire match, so if you spend all of your time at the beginning of a match you're not going to be able to accomplish much.