Fourteen years ago, Ian Proulx was unhappy. He had just bought Halo: Reach, and when faced with the new abilities his Spartans had, he worried that having them running around and duck-rolling would ruin the spirit of traditional Halo. Fast forward to today, a twist of fate has found him the co-founder and CEO of a video game development company, and his colleagues at 1047 Games found themselves adding abilities and (gasp) factions to Splitgate 2. The tables have turned.
The original Splitgate was an absolute homage to the good old days of old-school Halo, albeit with portals and momentum thrown in, delighting FPS fans when it was released in 2019. While the series began as the work of 25 people in a dorm room, its sequel, Splitgate 2, is a much larger, better-funded product. While a lot is changing, Proulx told me at Gamescom last month that the fundamentals of Splitgate had to remain the same. The gunplay, the portals, the uniquely fun atmosphere. But still, something had to change.
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“A big [weakness] “It’s a meaningful variety that’s purposeful,” Proulx explains. “In Splitgate, everyone is exactly the same. The game has 20 different modes, but they’re all different flavors of the same thing. It’s a lot of fun, but what we saw was that players would come in, play for three or four weeks, have a blast, and then they’d run out of things to do.”
The solution to the player retention and diversity issues that 1047 Games decided to inject? A faction system. There are three different factions in the game, catering to different play styles and with abilities that Proulx hopes will keep things fresh. I also felt a general increase in the quality of the game when I tried it out at the show. You can certainly feel the flow of more money into Splitgate, but you can also feel a slight change in direction, thanks in large part to these factions and the benefits they bring.
Proulx elaborated on what it was like going into Splitgate 2, and the added pressure of following up on the success of the previous game. “With Splitgate 1, there was no expectation, so there was no comparison. With Splitgate 2, every decision you make, there’s people saying, ‘I prefer it the old way.’ I remember being one of them! I remember playing Halo: Reach and thinking, ‘What the hell is going on, why are they adding abilities?’ And it was the same with Halo: 4, right? Same feeling.”
“I certainly take note of that, and it was very important to us to retain the feel of Splitgate 1. That’s why we kept the emphasis on gunplay, portals, and movement like in the first game. So you’ll notice all the factions in the game – they all have the same movement, health, and time to kill. These new abilities add to the game, but at the end of the day it comes down to the basics of portals and shooting.”
But surely a one-way barrier, a one-time health boost, and a brief wall attack that reveals enemies behind a wall will have a significant impact? When Proulx was skeptical about adding powerful abilities to the Halo series more than a decade ago, did he realize that he was in the same position as the Bungie and later 343 employees who made these controversial choices all those years ago? Was he worried?
“It’s both and it’s not,” the developer said. “The reason I’m not too worried is that we’ve been playing it internally for a while, we’ve had external playtesters, and now that we’ve opened the game up to new players, we’re seeing a lot of initial concerns being alleviated. Players who were worried about it turning into an ability-based shooter are realizing it’s still about shooting and moving.”
So what’s the trick to avoiding the problems that plagued Halo: Reach? In Proulx’s opinion, you can’t avoid it completely, but you can find a balance. “You can’t avoid it 100% no matter what you do. You can’t please everyone. If all we wanted to do was please everyone, we would have made the same game but with better graphics and called it a day. But I don’t think that game would have gotten us to the scale that we wanted, and I don’t think it would have had the longevity that it deserved. So it’s a question of balance, how do you make a game that plays to its strengths but also offers more variety and more ways to play.”
Inevitably, some people will want to revisit the classic gaming experience after playing Splitgate 2, but for me, it’s at least a little amusing, and certainly heartwarming, to see FPS aficionados grow from fans to lead developers, making the same major decisions as the people in charge of the games they love. True innovation happens, in my opinion at least, when a new generation takes that leap and thinks they can do better than the ones who came before them. So can Splitgate 2 avoid the problems of Halo Reach? Probably not entirely, but the people behind it are certainly trying in a unique and ultimately enjoyable way.
