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

Mountaintop Studios Announcing a new developer update video for Ghost divisionand offers a sneak peek at “Flashpoint,” the title’s first main season Update content. It will be released in mid-February with a version of the game for console players.

the A three-versus-three multiplayer tactical shooter It will debut worldwide on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series The game featured an unusual anime art style and interesting tactics as players had a second body that they could deploy and move into during a match. But the start was difficult.

In addition to quality of life improvements for PC players, Mountaintop has focused on developing controller support for both PC and console versions. Weekly playtests for the function are currently underway, and interested players can register here to participate.

Specter Divide looked promising as they showcased the game in the summer and launched the game on August 1st. But it had a lot of bugs, including some that caused the system to crash. Mountaintop CEO Nate Mitchell said in an interview with GamesBeat that the team has had layoffs but there are still a lot of people working on it and trying to improve the experience for players.

Mitchell, who was a co-founder of Oculus, started Mountaintop in 2020 with game designer Lee Horn and the title has been in the works for four years. The mountain peak rose 30 million dollars Then it was quiet while the team figured out what to do. They built a team of 70 people, and sought help from gaming influencer Shroud, an experienced gamer who helped them with features that players would love. Their goal was to build a tactical shooter that people could play for 10,000 hours.

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

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

Tough start

It was launched in early September, but, as mentioned, there were several problems. On September 26, the company laid off 13 of its employees.

“It’s no secret, we got off to a rocky start. The game crashed on launch day. That was tough, especially for players who were very excited to play. We had performance issues, especially on a wider variety of devices than we tested,” Mitchell said. “In the beta, we had more areas online, more people with communication challenges, communication challenges. We weren’t running servers all over the world. “We heard those comments loud and clear.”

In the wake of the layoffs, Mitchell said the company had to make reforms with a smaller team. He said his goal is to focus on profitability, which is a must for an independent, self-publishing studio.

“We have to make ends meet. Hopefully this is better than breaking even running the studio and running the game, but ultimately, we have to make some profits, and that’s really what the focus is for us. Next year, we’ll look at how we can make sure we can Maintain the team we have.

There were also comments on pricing as well.

“The bones are the same, the core is the same, but everything has been fine-tuned and optimized based on what the players want to see,” Horn said.

On Steam, the number of players has reached about one million so far. 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 midst of overhauling the game. Mitchell said that the team considered removing the game from the market, but saw that there were players who were having fun and running tournaments, so it did not make sense to withdraw the game from them.

“We really want the players to know that we believe in the game and are trying to make it better,” Horn said. So by continuing to update it as if we were here on Discord, they can chat with us, and we won’t go anywhere. We are working to improve it every day.”

Reassembly

Horn said in an interview with GamesBeat that the team’s goal is to make the title feel like a completely new game when players return for Season 1.

“It’s not just tweets here and there. We spent a lot of time after launch listening to player feedback. Part of the reason we did this is because we would take more time to do the first season,” Horn said. “It was clear we needed to do this.” In a big way it really affects all the feedback and we felt this fundamental change.”

“One of the biggest changes we’re super excited about is that we’re adding sprint racing,” Horn said. “Anytime there’s a new movement mechanic, it’s a big shift in the game. One of the comments we received was that it was slow to rotate and felt sluggish. We actually found that speedruns just open up the game.

He added: “You actually get more team play out of that, which is a pretty crazy thing to say from a mechanic, but the net result is that your team together is more able to support your team. You can flank and get into position, you can rotate and stand back. We are “We’re very passionate about speed racing, and this is a great example of a feature that takes time to improve and we don’t want to just cram it in there.”

New content for the first season of “Flashpoint”.

Like in The Hunger Games, there are sponsors in the game who can send you items to give you an advantage in battle. The new update is the Tactical Monark, and there’s a new map coming called Canal, which will allow the team to show off more sci-fi world building, Horn said.

There are also new characters, weapon skins, and cosmetics.

Horn said the patron will give you a “combat escape,” a shield that can protect you while it’s activated.

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

There are updates to the original maps to create better corridors around where you expect enemies to be and more readability. There will be a significant reduction in the prices of cosmetics. Horn said that the console’s gameplay has been in the works for a long time and that the team plays with it all the time now. The company decided that it was ready and therefore the controller could be used for the console or PC versions.

Horn said the team has good back-end tools and can see crash rates and performance on different hardware specifications. This helps identify problems. The company is also reaching out to gamers on Discord and Reddit. It also has a group of trusted players who have been helping out for a couple of years. The team responded to thousands of Steam reviews. Overall reviews out of 18,740 reviews were mixed, with a rating of three out of five stars.

More information about Flashpoint and console launch will be shared in future updates, which will be released early next year.

Under development

Below is a complete list of changes currently in development. It includes game state and quality of life updates, which means fewer crashes. There’s also a new “quick race” action mechanic, a new sandbox rebalancing, a new economy tuning (where cosmetics will cost much less per item than in the past), updated maps for improved gunplay, and updated and improved basic face models.

Furthermore, there will be the long-awaited Careers tab, infrastructure improvements, client and server performance upgrades, improved networking and new server regions across the world, thousands of fixes shipped since launch based on player feedback, faster combat and more. Speed, movement and visual fixes for a more lively game. Anti-fraud has undergone months of fine-tuning and advancements and has made significant gains in detection and blocking. Observer mode has been launched.

“We’re trying to be transparent with players. We’ve been kind of quiet. We put out a post basically saying: ‘Hey, we’re going to really focus on adding to the game.’ So the development video is actually a ‘Check out all the things that We do them.” “It’s a very broad list,” Mitchell said.