Omega Strikersis an upcoming 3v3 competitive brawler, in which players take control of various heroes to knock both the ball and their opponents around the map using abilities to score points.Omega Strikersis the first title from new game studio Odyssey Interactive, and the game’s recent PC demo has plenty of players excited about the game’s official release.
Omega Striker’sLead Game Director and Odyssey co-founder David Capurro alongside Marketing Director Ryan Rigney spoke to Game Rant about its content approach, the struggles of running a free-to-play live-service game, their prior development experience onApex LegendsandLeague of Legends, and much more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: So to start, can I have everybody give a brief introduction about themselves, and then tell me a little bit about Omega Strikers itself?
Rigney: Yes, definitely. I’m Ryan, I’m the Marketing Director. I joined late in 2021, so I’ve been here for like half the lifespan of the company. It’s still a pretty new company – started in 2020. Before I was Marketing Director here, I’ve been working on live-service games for a long time. I was Director of Comms and Community on Apex Legends working for Respawn and was Communications Lead on theLeague of Legends franchise as well.
Capurro:I’m David, I’m the co-founder, so I’ve been here since 2020 when things got started, and yeah, my background is in game design. So previously, I was a game designer in various capacities at Riot onLeague of Legends as well. Now I’m Lead of Game Design, Game Director, whatever you want to call it, on Omega Strikers.
Rigney: So,Omega Strikers is a three versus three competitive game. It looks a lot like air hockey but it’s a hero-based game, so you’re using your powers and your abilities, which are different for each character, to sort of knock the ball which we call a core around the map. You might call it a puck and say you’re trying to score goals – it’s a goal-scoring game. One of the twists of our game is that you can also use your abilities against your opponents; you can knock them out of the arena, blast them out, throw tofu balls at them, and they’ll go flying off and explode. So it’s a little bit of a combat game as well.
It’s coming April 27 to just about everything: we’ve officially announced Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and PC. We also did a beta last year, September through the end of the year, only on PC, which went really well. We had about 1.4 million people play, which was cool, because we didn’t really spend money on marketing. We had really great reviews, like 80% positive on Steam with over 10,000 reviews, so we’re very excited for the full launch where we’re going to try to go big with this thing.
Q: Great. So why did the Odyssey team decide to go with the free-to-play live-service model for Omega Strikers? Were there talks about going with different models, or was this always the plan for the game?
Rigney: I think for a competitive game,it really does help to go free-to-playif you can. Right now, that creates a lot of challenges because you have to be able to make a game that sustains players long enough to the point where they’re getting value over a long enough time that they’re spending money. You’re not trying to just get all your money upfront, and then have them be done with it in a couple of hours. But I think beyond just the business considerations of wanting to scale, we had an overall vision of wanting this to be a competitive game that was open to anybody. And so that’s part of the reason it’s on all these devices fully cross-platform, like we wanted it to be really, really accessible. So whether you’re a kid in the Philippines with an Android phone, or somebody in France with a high-end gaming PC, you’re able to jump in and play at the same level as anyone else with no advantages and compete. Obviously, you know, the servers are region based, but you get the idea. It’s open to anyone, so I think that was probably the biggest strategic reason.
I’ll also say that everyone on this team has a background, reallydeeply informed by working on free-to-play live-service competitive games, which are several specific sub-genres of free-to-play. So we kind of feel like this is our bread and butter, and this is what we know how to do. What we wanted to do was make a game that was like the games we love, but for the next generation of players. That’s why in many ways it matches some of the other games we’ve worked on, especially in terms of the monetization strategy, which is free-to-play with paid cosmetics, no pay-to-win or pay-for-power sort of thing.
Q: In 2023 alone, we’ve seen the shutdown of several smaller free-to-play live-service games like Rumbleverse and Knockout City. Why do you think these smaller titles have been struggling so much to keep up with this format, and how does Omega Strikers plan to combat these problems?
Rigney: I mean, high level, this is the challenge for a free-to-play game, right? Like, how do you keep players engaged? If you don’t solve this, you don’t have a game. A lot of premium games do make a great game that players love and that millions play, but for free-to-play, it doesn’t actually work that way. Because if they leave in two weeks, your whole plan kind of falls apart. So for us, this is something we’ve always been really mindful of. Part of the reason we did our open beta on PC was to validate some of the core stuff, right? Like, is this at its core a fun game? Because for us, that’s what really matters, and we went out there without that much content, right?There were only like 10 strikers at launchand one map background. But we want to develop and validate that core idea and figure out how players engage with the game, and then how ask do we add depth to that.
We’ve spent basically, the last eight or nine months now, working on addressing that problem of adding depth to the game, and adding enough content to the game that it’s something that can grab people over time. I’ve sometimes made the joke that when we did the open beta, it was as if Super Smash Bros was only like eight characters, no items, final destination. That’s great, a lot of people would love to play Smash Bros that way, right? [laughs] But you want to build a whole experience around it, so that’s what we’ve been doing ever since the beta. I think one of the things we learned from the beta was that we needed to make some core design changes to the game, to add depth in ways that even players that played during the beta might not expect. So David’s been leading the charge on that.
Capurro:I think one of the main things we learned on how we can improve the game from the beta was that one of the pillars of the game is thatit’d be simple and intuitive, right? But we think we actually made it a little too much in that direction, where it was almost too straightforward. So over the last six to eight months, we kind of bent the rules around exactly how surface-level intuitive things should be, exactly how much depth this player group we’re trying to serve is ready for, and that type of thing. We took that sort of base model, and now we’re just kind of expanding in that direction. So I think there’s that type of thing – just expanding what we know, working and just letting players inform us what their sort of tolerances for complexity are. I think we were a little bit on the shy side there, right? So we can give them a little more credit for their willingness to handle a little more difficulty and complexity and give them something bigger to dig into, right?
Like Ryan said, we’re launching on all platforms. That was always the DNA of the game, and you can see that if you look at the game, it’s a one-screen game. You’re not dragging maps around, you’re not overlaying menu after menu after menu. Each character only has, you know, five abilities with two of them being shared across all characters, so it’s not like if you have a keyboard that has 50 key presses, you have some massive advantage over someone that’s on a phone and is trying to do that weird claw grip thing or someone using an enhanced controller or something like that.
Our philosophy for designing the game from the get-go was that if we could challenge ourselves to create a really deep, really interesting play experience that we could really enjoy on the phones, we could then take the direction of bringing it up to the higher spec platforms of consoles and PCs, as opposed to what we perceivea lot of the other cross-platform strategies are, which is to take something that works on PC or console and then attempt to sort of jam it downward into the phone or Switch, right? There are more constraints, but if we started with those constraints laid out and then built gameplay around that, we could have an experience that works on all platforms.
There are differences from platform to platform, so the goal isn’t really that the game is 100% equitable across every single piece of hardware you might use. But really, the goal is that if you want to get the game, if you want to play and compete, there’s almost nothing getting in your way from really jumping on. If you get to the point where you’re 1000 hours in or whatever, and you feel like you need some sort of specific setup that would make things advantageous by some small degree of percentage points, we’re comfortable with that. But insofar as getting into the game and seeing what it’s about, people should be well suited to do that.
Rigney:I think, to that point even when we tell people it’s fully cross-platform, they hear that, but then they’re still surprised when we actually show it to them on the phone because it’s literally the exact same game. People usually still ask, “what’s different?” but it’s just the controls. It’s the controls and nothing else. And even then people still have questions as if that can’t be true.
Q: You guys mentioned it briefly, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the PC beta that ended a few months ago. What are some of the most valuable pieces of feedback that you got from that beta?
Capurro:: First and foremost, because there are positives and negatives, I think it’s easy to see things you have to learn from in a negative light, so I’ll gloss over the positive feedback real quick. It’s more fruitful as an analytical mind to think of the negatives, but the positives were that people came and they enjoyed it. They gave really strong reviews. Even within the negative things people had to say, a lot of it was like, “the population isn’t big enough in this country that I’m playing from." By and large, people said the gameplay feels very uniquely its own, and we think that’s one of the most positive virtues you can have in a game. Because if people were, by contrast, saying “this is actually Rocket League” or “this is actually League of Legends” but with this tiny twist, then our belief is that you can count on them being like “why would I stick to this?” if the offering is the same as something else. But by and large, people were saying it’s fun and it feels like its own game, so those are like the largest indicators of positive direction for us.
Then on the side of negatives or things that need to be worked on – the game wasn’t complete, right? Players were happy to point out the ways in which it was not complete. Basically, you log in and you can play the game, right? We call it the core gameplay. You can get into a match, you can hit the ball, you can check out the characters, you know, you can do a few things with your loadouts and stuff like that. But by and large, we had the core gameplay and nothing else. Players notice that the Battle Pass was short, and that’s a way that players kind of get invested in the game. The content was acceptable, but it was short and it could be better. There are things to express that you can use to express your interest in certain characters – I think we did the beta with like, three skins in the game, but it was kind of to the point where it was like, “hey, does clicking the buy button work?” It was more that you were makingthe choice to buy a skin at allrather than making a choice as to which skin to buy. We also just learned things as well about how we can improve the depth, replayability, and variants of the game from game to game.
We’ve developed a lot of fanatical players who feel like the game is really intuitive, but I think the game could be described a bit as like a sugar rush. You get in queue, the queue pops instantly, you play a match, it’s five minutes, you slam that button again, you play 20 matches, and it’s been an hour. So, now we’re building in a little bit more of an experience to the game – there’ll be moments of uptime and downtime, and there’ll be more stories to exactly how you go about scoring a point, right? The sort of systems by which your character gets stronger within a match are changing pretty dramatically, and within that, we’ll have some shock factors for returning players. But by and large, with the testing we’ve done, the new player experience seems to indicate that they really liked this, and it’s been enjoyable. So as much as things indicate from the review side and such that people like the game, we do want to sort of really put our foot on the gas, and we’re not really afraid of changing things. In fact, we think it’s really important to evolve the game, as opposed to players really expecting the game that they already saw.
Q: You guys talked about some of your prior development on games like this, mentioning some pretty big games like Apex and League. How does the development process for something like this differ between a huge game with pre-established player bases like those, versus starting from scratch on something new?
Rigney: Yeah, it’s such a funny one. At the highest level, the hardest thing is to come from a starting point where you have to realize that you have to make people care. Who cares that we’re making a game? There are so many games, right? Whereas sometimes it felt like playing on easy mode, when you could just do something in League of Legends and 100 million people are going to see it, and you didn’t have to do anything to go get them because they were going to log in anyway. So that is a huge change,even Apex was starting to feel that way. Starting from zero, or close to zero, is so difficult. For us, the way that we did we started was that we always said we want it to be like a competitive game for the next generation of players.
We started with college kids all over the place, first from the University of Waterloo, which is near the main Odyssey office in Ontario, and then college kids from Esports teams at schools all over the US. I’m from the South, so we kind of started there at the University of Mississippi, LSU, and a lot of Texas schools. We just brought them in and played. We were able to find our way by starting with this core audience, we realized competitive college kids love this game, so they can be our kind of guiding light. It’s so tough when you feel like you don’t have a guiding light, right? Like you’re making something that you believe is good, but you don’t have any way to validate that, unlike when you’re working ona big game like League of Legendsand you’re going to find out whether or not it’s good really, really fast. That’s not the hard part – they will tell you. Finding the right audience and establishing that loop where you have this community that you trust, and they trust you, and they’re giving you what they really think to kind of help build alongside you. That’s so difficult.
We actually just did a test this weekend, where we just opened it up for like a few thousand people who had played before. We’re getting their responses, getting them to rate and review some of the changes made to the game, and that was just such a relief to be able to do that without having to tear hair out to figure out where to get the players. Already having done the beta on PC has made that so much easier.
Capurro:I was going to take it from a developer standpoint, where for Omega Strikers, it’s just like you have no time to sit there and dwell on things. You have to make decisions, you have to be pretty fast about that. That’s pretty different from working on a much more established game where we would say things like, “you know if you just stop doing your job tomorrow, the train is going to keep going and somebody will probably pick up the slack.” There was a weird feeling of not having a ton of individual impact. But at the same time, to have a great impact is also very difficult because no one wants to take a risk on a really out-of-the-blue type of idea. It takes a long time to validate what we’re going to do for the game; it’s a very different environment to be building for.In a game that’s unestablished, you’re making decisions on like, is it worth it to build this feature? Players may expect this feature in a game like this, is it worth spending three months to make this? Or is it better to get the game out there, see what people are saying about the existing set, and then build the new feature around those things?
You’re not really thinking about those things when you’re working on a very well-oiled machine, right? You’re thinking about the big beats and balance patches you need to fill in the gaps, and then reinventing that season after season. That’s all scaffolding that has to get built up, and so we’re still building that scaffolding. If we’re going to have a tournament system, or something like that, the game has to be built alongside making new characters and doing all these other validations of the game. It has to be made against the decision to make some other mode or to do some other things that maybe could bring similar workload or value. So there’s a lot more foundational building that you have to do and a lot of trade-offs you have to make.
I think one of the very few fair critiques that come out about free-to-play games is that they’re not finished, so players may get a half-baked experience, right? So there really is, at least from our perspective, a lot of treading the line between, “hey, which experiences are actually authentic to the vision of the game?” versus, “we’re just trying to push it out there and let her rip.” No one can really afford to wait until the game is perfectly finished and has every feature that has ever been seen in a game, right? That will probably take ten years, and the genre and industry will have changed by then, so there’s a pretty big balancing act to do.
Rigney: That was one big benefit of having already done the one bare-bones release. Now we feel like there’s so much more to it, like the core of what really matters to players is there alongside some things they didn’t expect, like the super seamlessway that cross-progression workswith account linking and all that. There are absolutely things that players want us to add that seem obvious we should have, and we want to say we’re adding them in a few patches. For example, the spectator tool right now – it works, but…
Capurro:It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. you’re able to’t draw on the screen and stuff, it’s just an honest spectator mode. It all has to get built up.
Rigney: Maybe as a season three thing, drawing on the screen, haha. But we had to build the core experience first, if that makes sense.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about some of the updates that you have planned for after launch? Some of the things that you have planned to keep players around long term?
Rigney: Yes. We’ve planned out all of 2023. I’ll go ahead and say that, I don’t think we’ve actually said this to anyone else, but we are planning on having 26 strikers by the end of the year. If our plan is stalled, things can always get delayed, but we have this schedule of a new striker every three months, and every month a new event where we have something in-game like maybe a cool original mission system with astory-based click-through narrativelike an experience mode. That’s a real one we’re planning. So there’s like a Summer Splash event around June and a cool, nightmarish theme idea we have for later in the year.
But the real core is about the gameplay, so the strikers and balance patches are coming out on a weekly basis, not a monthly one. We’ll also probably have, alongside the season updates, bigger changes that are surprising for players like a whole new mode or a whole new way to play, that sort of thing. There are really gameplay-warping and play-redefining things we want to add by the end of the year. By launch, it should feel like a full game, and by the end of the year, it should feel like we’ve shipped an expansion pack or two.
Q: Great. Is there anything else that you’d like to discuss that I maybe didn’t get at?
Rigney: Hmm. I think I would just say like, one thing that’s very different for us for this launch from the beta is that we were going at such a small scale, just kind of rolling the game out with a very little budget, like on PC. And that was an amazing experience, and part of the reason we’re feeling much more confident going into our launch is that we have all this amazing support across all the platforms. We were in Nintendo Direct in between amazing games like Metroid Prime, and some otherbeautiful-looking indie games like Sea of Stars. I think we’ve reached a point where we’re going to have a much better time reaching players this time around, which is something that I’m really excited about. Part of the problem of building a sustained gain is getting enough players. We went small before, so we’re ready to go big now.
Omega Strikersis available now on Mobile devices, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
