Serious Sam: Shatterverse – A Brand New Take on a Classic

When Behaviour Interactive heard that Devolver was on the lookout for a developer to make a brand new Severe Sam, we couldn’t have been extra excited and we jumped on the alternative. Many people on the group had fond recollections of taking part in Severe Sam: The First Encounter when it was launched within the early 2000s and remembered the wacky enjoyable the franchise is thought for. , it got here from an period when video video games had been unapologetically video games first, at all times pushing the bounds of what the know-how might do. As large followers of Croteam’s work, we merely couldn’t move it up.

As discussions moved ahead, we knew we wished to make one thing completely different, one thing that might construct on the legacy of Severe Sam and honor what got here earlier than, whereas nonetheless standing by itself and shining a brand new mild on the franchise. We wished to create a sport that longtime followers would instantly acknowledge, however {that a} youthful viewers with no historical past with Severe Sam might soar into simply as simply. And so, Shatterverse got here to be.

Our first job was to recreate the texture of Severe Sam in Unreal Engine, the backpedaling, the gunplay, the traditional enemies, after which modernize and redesign these components. We knew early on that The First Encounter and The Second Encounter can be our greatest inspirations as a result of these are the video games we nonetheless replay to today. With the franchise’s 25^th anniversary arising, we wished the brand new sport to really feel like a celebration of the place all of it started. That meant preserving the high-octane motion, the large enemy waves, and naturally, the bosses. Severe Sam has at all times been recognized for large showdowns in opposition to spectacular baddies, so we wished each boss to really feel like a serious set piece and a real take a look at of the gamers’ would possibly.

At that stage, the sport felt good and positively regarded like Severe Sam, nevertheless it was nonetheless lacking one thing: its personal id. We thought lengthy and onerous about why folks missed the great outdated days and what they felt when taking part in the unique video games. We wished to seek out that feeling once more with out merely copying what Croteam had already achieved, and we ultimately zeroed in on two design targets. The primary was that urge to replay the identical mission time and again, attempting to find each secret and chasing the next rating. The second was the sensation that something might occur and that typically the deck was stacked in opposition to you, (due to Croteam’s typically cheeky encounter design). As we talked via convey these emotions again, the FPS roguelike style shortly emerged as the proper match.

That stated, roguelike FPS video games can nonetheless really feel fairly area of interest and onerous to get into, and we wished Shatterverse to be simple to select up and share with household and mates, even when that they had by no means touched a Severe Sam sport, an FPS, or a roguelike earlier than. Each system wanted to be simple to understand whereas nonetheless providing sufficient depth to reward mastery. That accessibility additionally formed our strategy to multiplayer: we wished a sport folks might maintain taking part in collectively for years to come back, not one that might disappear from the “digital cabinets” if it didn’t change into a large success.

To make that potential, we selected peer-to-peer multiplayer as an alternative of counting on devoted servers and included an offline solo mode, making certain the sport might nonetheless be performed 5, 10, and even 15 years from now. It was actually vital to the group to create one thing that would final and by no means merely be shut down. We additionally wished Shatterverse to launch as an entire, appropriately priced standalone sport, one which was value gamers’ cash from the get-go and didn’t want live-service releases to be enjoyable. On the identical time, we had so many concepts for locations to go to, outdated and new enemies and weapons to create, and all of the loopy issues we might do with Shatterverse. So, we constructed the sport to help expansions, DLC, and new content material that would develop the bottom expertise if followers wished extra, with out ever cannibalizing the sport that they had already paid for.

The group has been extremely excited by the reception throughout our many beta playtests, and we’ve listened intently to neighborhood suggestions as we’ve continued to tweak and polish the Shatterverse expertise. The Severe Sam neighborhood is a devoted one, and its help has helped us make the sport even higher via a number of rounds of testing. What makes us proudest is that our core viewers appeared to grasp instantly what we had been attempting to do: create a Severe Sam sport they may simply share with others, spreading their love of the franchise and serving to it attain a brand new viewers. In the end, we hope Shatterverse not solely welcomes newcomers, but in addition evokes them to select up the sooner video games and change into followers themselves.

We hope you’ll choose up Serious Sam: Shatterverse and assemble a squad to tackle Psychological’s hordes to avoid wasting the Samverse!