Mountaintop Studios introduced a brand new developer replace video for Spectre Divide, providing a sneak peek at “Flashpoint,” the title’s first main seasonal content material replace. It’s coming in mid-February together with a model of the sport for console gamers.
The three-versus-three multiplayer tactical shooter will debut worldwide on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X/S in February. The sport had an uncommon anime artwork type and attention-grabbing ways the place gamers had a second physique that they may deploy and transfer to throughout a match. However the launch was powerful.
Along with quality-of-life optimizations for PC gamers, Mountaintop will proceed to deal with including new content material options for Season 1, making QOL enhancements requested by PC gamers, as nicely finalizing the event of console variations. Weekly playtests for the performance are presently underway, and gamers can join right here to take part.
Spectre Divide appeared promising because it confirmed off the sport in the summertime and launched the title on August 1. Nevertheless it had a variety of bugs, together with some that induced system crashes. The staff had a layoff however there are nonetheless a variety of people engaged on it and making an attempt to enhance the expertise for gamers, mentioned Nate Mitchell, CEO of Mountaintop, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Mitchell, who was a cofounder of Oculus, began Mountaintop in 2020 with sport designer Lee Horn and the title has been within the works for 4 years. Mountaintop raised $30 million after which went quiet because the staff discovered what to make. They constructed a staff of 70 individuals, and enlisted the assistance of gaming influencer Shroud, an skilled participant who helped them with options that gamers would love. Their objective was to construct a tactical shooter sport that individuals would play for 10,000 hours.
I performed the sport and it was harking back to Counter-Strike, a sport that the staff cherished. Nevertheless it had a twist. In Spectre Divide, Mountaintop created Duality, the place you’ve two our bodies managed by one participant. You may play as one character in a 3v3 match, after which place your second character in a strategic or secret spot by tossing a puck on the spot.
Then you may immediately change between characters. If one of many spectres is killed, you routinely change to the opposite one. You get the advantage of one thoughts, two our bodies. It’s an innovation that simply may allow the sport to seize its personal viewers of devoted followers within the extremely aggressive FPS market.
A tough begin
It launched in early September, however, as famous, there have been quite a few issues. On September 26, the corporate laid off 13 of its individuals.
“It’s no secret, we got off to a bumpy start. The game went down on launch day. That was brutal, especially for players who were super excited to play. We had performance issues, especially on a wider diversity of hardware than we tested,” Mitchell mentioned. “In the beta, we had more regions online, more people with networking challenges, connection challenges. We weren’t running servers all over the world. We heard that feedback loud and clear.”
Within the wake of the layoffs, Mitchell mentioned the corporate has needed to do the fixes with a smaller staff. It’s objective is to deal with attending to profitability, which is a should for an indie studio that’s self-publishing, he mentioned.
“We have to make ends meet. We hope that’s better than break even on running the studio and running the game, but ultimately, we’ve got to make some profit, and so that’s really the focus for us. We are looking at how we make sure that we can sustain the team we have.”
There was additionally pricing suggestions as nicely.
“The bones are the same, the core is the same, but everything really has been tuned up and improved based on what players want to see,” Horn mentioned.
On Steam, the variety of gamers has been about 1,000,000 to date. The concurrency is low with about 1,000 gamers enjoying, in comparison with a peak of 81,000 4 months in the past, as the corporate has slowed its advertising and marketing and is within the midst of fixing the sport. The staff thought-about taking the sport off the market nevertheless it noticed there are gamers who have been having enjoyable and working tournaments and so it didn’t make sense to take the sport away from them, Mitchell mentioned.
Horn mentioned, “We really want players to know that we believe in the game and we are trying to improve it. And so by continuing to update it like we’re here on Discord, they can chat with us, and we’re not going anywhere. We are improving it every day.”
Regrouping
The staff’s objective was to make the title really feel like a model new sport when gamers got here again for Season 1, Horn mentioned in an interview with GamesBeat.
“It’s not just a couple of tweets here and there. We’ve spent a lot of time after launch listening to player feedback. And part of the reason we did this is we’re going to take some more time to do Season 1,” Horn mentioned. “It was clear we needed to do it in a big way that really hit on all the feedback and felt like that substantial change.”
“One of the biggest changes that we’re very excited about is we’re adding sprint,” Horn mentioned. “Anytime there’s a new movement mechanic, that is a major game shift. One of the pieces of feedback we got was that it was slow to rotate and felt sluggish. We actually found that sprint just opens up the game.”
He added, “You actually get more team play out of it, which is pretty crazy to say from a mechanic, but the net result is your team is together more you’re able to support your team. You can flank and get into position, you can rotate and get behind. We’re very excited about sprint, and that is like a great example of a feature that takes some time to refine. We don’t want to just jam it in there.”
New “Flashpoint” Season 1 Content material
Like in The Starvation Video games, there are sponsors within the sport that may ship you issues to present you a bonus in battle. The brand new one for the replace is Monark Tactical, and there’s a brand new map coming referred to as Canal, which is able to let the staff showcase extra of its sci-fi worldbuilding, Horn mentioned.
There are additionally new characters, weapon skins, and cosmetics.
Horn mentioned the sponsor provides you with a “combat escape,” which is a defend that may shield you as you activate it.
The corporate mentioned the Season 1 Battle Move provides tons of worth together with greater than 70 whole rewards. Gamers can earn greater than a dozen free gadgets together with 4 character outfits, two weapon skins, and 10 extra goodies.
There are updates to the unique maps to create higher lanes round the place you count on enemies to be and extra readability. And there will probably be a significant discount within the worth of cosmetics. Horn mentioned that the controller gameplay has been within the works for a very long time and staff performs with it the entire time now. The corporate determined its prepared and so the controller can be utilized for the console or the PC variations.
Horn mentioned the staff has good backend instruments and it might probably see crash charges and efficiency on totally different {hardware} specs. That helps establish issues. The corporate additionally communicates with gamers on Discord and Reddit. It additionally has a bunch of trusted playtesters who’ve been serving to for a few years. The staff has responded to 1000’s of Steam evaluations. General evaluations among the many 18,740 evaluations is blended, with a ranking of three out of 5 stars.
Extra info on Flashpoint and Console launch will probably be shared in future updates, coming in February.
Underneath improvement
Right here’s a full record of the adjustments presently underneath improvement. They embrace sport well being and high quality of life updates, that means fewer crashes. There’s additionally a brand new “sprint” motion mechanic, recent sandbox rebalancing, new economic system tuning (the place cosmetics will value quite a bit much less per merchandise than previously), present maps up to date to enhance gunplay and up to date and improved base facial fashions.
On high of that, there will probably be a protracted awaited “Careers” tab, infrastructure enhancements, shopper and server efficiency upgrades, improved networking and new server areas world-wide, 1000’s of fixes shipped since launch based mostly on participant suggestions, sooner and snappier fight and motion and visible overhauls for a extra vibrant sport. Anti-cheat has undergone months of tuning and developments making main good points in detection and banning. And the observer mode has launched.
“We’re trying to be transparent with players. We’ve been sort of quiet. We did a post that basically said, ‘Hey, we’re going to really focus on adding to the game.’ So the dev video is really to say, ‘Check out all the things we’re doing. It’s a pretty extensive list,’” Mitchell mentioned.
