Mountaintop details on Specter Divide’s first season and console launch in February

Mountaintop Studios announced a new developer update video for Specter Divideand offers a sneak peek of “Flashpoint,” the title’s first major season Content update. It will be released in mid-February alongside a version of the game for console players.

The Three-on-three multiplayer tactical shooter will be released worldwide in February on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game had an unusual anime art style and interesting tactics where players had a second body that they could use and move to during a match. But the start was tough.

In addition to optimizing the quality of life for PC players, Mountaintop will continue to focus on adding new content features for Season 1, making quality of life improvements requested by PC players, and completing development of console versions. Weekly playtests are currently underway for the functionality where there is interest Players can register here to participate.

Specter Divide looked promising when it unveiled the game over the summer, releasing the title on August 1st. But it had many bugs, including some that caused system crashes. The team had a layoff, but there are still a lot of people working on it and trying to improve the experience for players, Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell said in an interview with GamesBeat.

Oculus co-founder Mitchell launched Mountaintop in 2020 with game designer Lee Horn and the title has been in the works for four years. Mountain peaks elevated 30 million dollars and then there was silence as the team thought about what to do. They built a team of 70 people and enlisted the help of gaming influencer Shroud, an experienced gamer, to help them with features that players would love. Their goal was to create a tactical shooter game that people would play for 10,000 hours.

I played the game and it was reminiscent of Counter-Strike, a game the team loved. But it had a twist. In Specter Divide, Mountaintop created duality, where two bodies are controlled by one player. You can play as one character in a 3v3 match and then place your second character in a strategic or secret location by throwing a puck at the spot.

Then you can switch between characters instantly. If one of the ghosts is killed, you will automatically switch to the other. You benefit from one mind and two bodies. It’s an innovation that will potentially allow the game to gain its own audience of dedicated fans in the highly competitive FPS market.

A bumpy start

The launch took place at the beginning of September, but as already mentioned there were numerous problems. On September 26, the company laid off 13 of its employees.

“It’s no secret we had a rocky start. The game failed on release day. It was brutal, especially for players who were excited about the game. We had performance issues, particularly with a wider variety of hardware than we tested,” said Mitchell. “In the beta we had more regions online, more people with network and connection issues. We did not operate servers around the world. We heard that feedback loud and clear.”

After the layoffs, the company had to make repairs with a smaller team, Mitchell said. His goal is to focus on making a profit, which is a must for a self-publishing indie studio, he said.

“We have to make ends meet. We’re hoping that’s better than breaking even on running the studio and running the game, but ultimately we need to make some profit and that’s really the focus for us. We’re looking at how we can make sure we can maintain the team we have.”

There was also feedback on pricing.

“The bones are the same, the core is the same, but everything has really been adjusted and improved based on what the players want,” Horn said.

The number of players on Steam has so far been around one million. Concurrency is low, with about 1,000 players playing, compared to a peak of 81,000 four months ago, as the company has slowed its marketing and is in the process of fixing the game. The team considered pulling the game from the market, but saw that there were players who had fun and had tournaments, so it didn’t make sense to take the game away from them, Mitchell said.

Horn said: “We really want to show players that we believe in the game and are trying to improve it.” And by continuing to update it like we’re here on Discord, they can chat with us and we’re not going anywhere . We’re improving it every day.”

Regrouping

The team’s goal is to make the title feel like a brand new game when players return for the first season, Horn said in an interview with GamesBeat.

“It’s not just a few tweets here and there. We spent a lot of time listening to player feedback after launch. And one of the reasons we did that is because we’re going to take a little more time on Season 1,” Horn said. “It was clear we had to do it in a big way that really addressed all the feedback and felt like a significant change.”

“One of the biggest changes we’re excited about is the introduction of sprinting,” Horn said. “Every time there’s a new movement mechanic, it’s a big change in the game. One of the feedback we got was that it spun slowly and felt sluggish. We actually found that sprinting just opens up the game.”

He added: “It actually gives you more team play, which is pretty crazy for a mechanic to say, but the end result is that your team sticks together better and you can support them. “You can cross and get into position, you can turn and come to the back. We’re really excited about Sprint, and this is like a great example of a feature that takes time to refine. We don’t want to just stick it in there.”

New content for the first season of “Flashpoint”.

Like in The Hunger Games, the game has sponsors who can send you things to give you an advantage in battle. New for the update is Monark Tactical, and there will be a new map called Canal where the team can show off more of its sci-fi worldbuilding, Horn said.

There are also new characters, weapon skins and cosmetics.

Horn said the sponsor will give you a “fight escape,” a shield that can protect you when you activate it.

The company said the Season 1 Battle Pass offers tons of value, including more than 70 total rewards. Players can earn more than a dozen free items, including four character outfits, two weapon skins, and 10 additional goodies.

There are updates to the original maps to create better lanes around expected enemies and improve readability. And the prices of cosmetics will fall significantly. Horn said that the controller gameplay has been in the works for a long time and the team is now playing with it all the time. The company decided that the controller is ready and therefore can be used for the console or PC versions.

Horn said the team has good backend tools and can see crash rates and performance on different hardware specifications. This helps identify problems. The company also communicates with players on Discord and Reddit. There is also a group of trusted game testers who have been helping for a few years. The team responded to thousands of Steam reviews. The overall rating among the 18,740 reviews is mixed, with a rating of three out of five stars.

More information about Flashpoint and console launch will be released in future updates coming in February.

In development

Here is a full list of changes currently in development. This includes updates to game health and quality of life, resulting in fewer crashes. There’s also a new “sprint” movement mechanic, a sandbox rebalancing, new economic tuning (where cosmetics cost much less per item than in the past), existing maps updated to improve shooting gameplay, and updated and improved bases -Face models.

In addition, there will be a long-awaited “Career” tab, infrastructure improvements, client and server performance improvements, improved networks and new server regions worldwide, thousands of fixes released since launch based on player feedback, as well as faster and give faster combat as well as movement and visual overhauls for a more lively game. Anti-Cheat has been optimized and developed for months, resulting in significant progress in detection and banning. And observer mode is started.

“We try to be transparent with the players. We were kind of calm. We wrote a post that basically said, “Hey, we’re really going to focus on expanding the game.” So the dev video is actually saying, “Look at all the things we’re doing.” “It’s a pretty extensive list,” Mitchell said.