Fragpunk is like each shooter, all over the place, unexpectedly.
When a mysterious ingredient known as Glunite appeared, it shattered the Shardverse and gave Lancers their otherworldly skills, pulling folks from completely different realities right into a kaleidoscopic collection of parallel universes the place they now work as mercenaries accumulating Glunite for their very own ends.
However Fragpunk looks like a confluence of simultaneous realities on greater than an aesthetic stage. The principle recreation mode is a Name of Obligation-esque Search and Destroy bomb defusal, ties are settled with a collection of Warzone Gulag-style 1v1s, there are boing-boing motion pads like a battle royale, the gun financial system and dealing with think of CS:GO, whereas the combination of that with heroes is just like Valorant, then the presentation of these heroes – with lavishly produced comics and animated backstory movies – is harking back to Blizzard’s Overwatch.
Nonetheless, the distinctive facet of Fragpunk that each ramps up the chaos and holds all of it collectively is the Shard Playing cards.
Dealt between each spherical, Shard Playing cards place one-off modifiers on the following match. As you get kills and carry out goal actions all through a full recreation, you construct up factors which allow you to make investments into completely different Shard Playing cards, or save as much as pile every part into a very excellent power-play.
These results can vary from comparatively easy – however extraordinarily sturdy in fairly a twitch-intensive, low time-to-kill shooter – issues like buffing your max HP or turning on massive head mode for the enemy group, to transformative rule modifications which flip the entire map into an icy slip-and-slide or delete one of many bomb websites solely.
The playing cards add a 3rd metagame to your pre-match preparations, as it’s important to concurrently think about not simply your weapon and hero alternative, however how the playing cards you and your group have picked work together with your whole different choices.
“The playing cards can deliver you so many methods and produce a lot depth,” Xin Chang, Fragpunk artistic director, says. “We would like the sport to be extra artistic and add so many loopy concepts as a result of the playing cards implement completely different, unusual concepts.
“In the event you make a standard aggressive shooter recreation, you don’t have the possibility to deliver so many turning factors as a result of perhaps gamers care extra in regards to the stability or they don’t settle for so many modifications to every spherical. However our characteristic is the change, in order that’s okay.”
Most of the character skills in Fragpunk really feel very sturdy, from weapon expertise like Dealer’s built-in rocket launcher and Hollowpoint’s one-shot one-kill sniper, to far-reaching teleports on Corona and Serket, Sonar’s muffling and Kismet’s enemy detection.
The mixture of highly effective, typically explosive, hero skills and this fixed ruleset shake-up provides Fragpunk a tangibly distinctive edge that might make each spherical really feel thrilling if Unhealthy Guitar Studio can keep away from a scenario the place some playing cards are so clearly higher than others that they grow to be an auto-pick.
With all of those enormous results going off directly, Fragpunk may also really feel chaotic and there’s positively a studying curve the place it looks like you’re getting blown away in a single hit very often, nonetheless, the supposed course for the sport as gamers progress is away from capacity spam and extra in direction of strategic team-play and superior motion.
“Our chaos comes from the playing cards. That’s why we’re very cautious about making new playing cards,” Xin explains. “At the least at first, we don’t need new playing cards to be very overpowered – despite the fact that we play with a ban decide, we nonetheless attempt to make every card not OP, it’s essential.
“Chaos makes a recreation very enjoyable to play and really informal. But when gamers play the sport for a really very long time as aggressive gamers and develop their recreation ability they acquire extra management over successful and shedding. It shouldn’t be very chaotic. If it’s an excessive amount of chaos and also you don’t have a option to win it’s mainly luck. That’s what we don’t need.
“That’s why we’ve made some methods to make the sport extra aggressive.”
One of many methods Fragpunk brings these aggressive methods into the sport is with the tempo of play. Motion is designed to be quick and easy, however not super-fast like Apex Legends.
Unhealthy Guitar has tried to discover a candy spot the place issues like bunny leaping and different superior motion methods are attainable and encourage gamers to include motion into their play moderately than simply standing nonetheless and capturing, however aren’t the primary figuring out consider whether or not you win a gunfight.
The tip result’s purported to reward a participant’s ability with a marginal benefit that makes a strong distinction in tight conditions, but it surely’s apparently been a troublesome compromise to strike, as overturning motion may also result in oppressive gameplans too.
“Some characters are very sturdy and we have to do some work on that stability. In our assessments we discovered that gamers who can rush are very sturdy,” Xin says. “To take an instance, we don’t really feel prefer it’s very wholesome to have a number of characters who can rush into the purpose as a result of it’s not very technical. It’s very exhausting to defend them and makes the core gameplay extra boring as a result of you possibly can simply rush each time and take the spot.
“For this instance, we are going to nerf these sorts of characters. But when a personality is robust in controlling the map or slowing the tempo, we predict it’s okay. We predict that’s more healthy. It’s good to maintain that within the recreation and we don’t wish to make that form of change, even when it’s sturdy.“
So it looks like the goal, virtually counter-intuitively, behind sturdy character skills is to behave as a deterrent which slows the sport down. Then, moderately than counting on constantly overpowered hero skills or ultra-fast motion to offer matches a pure sense of pace, Fragpunk as an alternative creates a circulate by introducing a pure imbalance that’s central to a roaring debate inside aggressive FPS video games: group sizes.
“6v6 got here together with Overwatch and we tried it in our maps, but it surely didn’t work,” Xin concedes. “In the event you’re 6v6 you possibly can equally divide 3 folks at A and three folks at B, so it appears to be like very balanced. However we discovered that it’s important in a bomb defusal mode that your defending pressure at A, B and mid is just not balanced.
“When it’s not balanced gamers can give you completely different methods, however when there’s an equal variety of gamers there’s an optimum distribution, there’s one finest resolution for defending. That’s too strong.”
“That’s why for the sport mode that’s extra just like Counter Strike it’s 5v5, it could’t be 6v6. However for the mode extra just like Overwatch, I believe it’s okay as a result of they’re completely completely different video games – not like an FPS however extra like a MOBA. It’s essential have a tank, a healer, a DPS, and that works. However for a bomb defusal mode it’s a confirmed resolution and why we’re nonetheless 5v5.”
However inside that 5v5 framework, there nonetheless look to be an enormous quantity of choices for gamers instantly at launch, with greater than a dozen characters, a full suite of weapons and over 100 Shard Playing cards. So whereas Fragpunk is free-to-play and can obtain updates after launch, it’s not in Early Entry.
It additionally appears to be taking a extra player-centred strategy to the F2P mannequin that’s fortunately turning into extra frequent, with battle passes that don’t expire when you’ve purchased them, skill-based match-making in ranked, however not in informal modes, and customisable cross-play with each console and PC, or neither in case you desire.
Unhealthy Guitar is a NetEase Video games studio and will probably be attention-grabbing to see if Fragpunk follows an identical trajectory to NetEase’s different latest aggressive shooter, Marvel Rivals, which was wildly profitable, however finally laid off its whole US-based improvement group quickly after launch.
Fragpunk clearly doesn’t have the fast grabber of the Marvel license, however what it does have is a genuinely distinctive central mechanic in Shard Playing cards, thrilling and intense capturing, enormous skills, thrilling character design and what appears to be like like a broad sufficient content material providing to keep up a playerbase as soon as the launch hype has died down.
“I really feel it’s a necessary development for on-line service video games to have sufficient content material once they launch,” Xin states. “In case you have the power to offer sufficient content material, you need to. I believe for Early Entry, purely, it’s as a result of the group is small and so they don’t have sufficient effectivity for making sufficient content material in order that they use Early Entry to get some revenue to keep up improvement.
“I believe you probably have this sort of effectivity then it’s worthwhile to do as a lot as you possibly can and be effectively ready.”
Fragpunk launches on March 6 on PlayStation and Xbox consoles and on PC by way of Steam and the Epic Video games Retailer. Unhealthy Guitar is investigating the potential of a Nintendo Swap 2 port.
