Stardust to dust
Having pronounced arcade dead, Housemarque navigates the wilds of battle royale
A post-arcade Housemarque navigates the battle-royale genre
Last November, faced with sluggish sales of its wondrous shooter Nex Machina, Housemarque announced that it was moving away from the arcade games that had been its trademark since 1995. In August the Finnish studio gave us our first look at Stormdivers, an Unreal Engine battle-royale game with a strong emphasis on verticality – Player Unknown’s Crackdown, to cut a long story short. Housemarque’s older fans have reacted to this change of focus much as you’d expect. “It’s like, fuck you, why are you ruining my childhood?” game designer Henri Markus sums up. The outrage is hard to swallow, he says, because Housemarque still adores arcade games and would happily have carried on developing them, if only they would sell. “It’s painful to read that we need to go back to the arcade, because that means no more bread on the table.”
Not that Stormdivers is simply a cash-grab. Rather, staffers argue that it represents an evolution of the studio’s dazzling achievements in the arcade genre. Ideas for the game began to circulate in February 2015, with a prototype taking shape in December 2016. “Our past ideas for games, our current games – all of those ideas have come from the bottom up,” producer Sami Hakala notes, evidently mindful of claims that Housemarque’s executives imposed the battle-royale concept on its creatives. “The company leaders or stockholders never put ideas to the teams.” In any case, as Markus puts it, “Nobody is harbouring any illusions at the office that battle royale is easy fucking money.” The competition among battle-royale shooters has never been stiffer, and Stormdivers is quite the gamble – to say nothing of the studio’s other project, a “triple-A” original IP about which lips are currently sealed.
The Stormdivers team numbers around 15, all based at Housemarque’s Helsinki office. There are new faces, reflecting the need for wider expertise, but also plenty of seasoned staff. “We haven’t lost people due to this project, but we’ve hired more doing this than we did making the previous game,” Markus says. This being Housemarque’s second Unreal project has eased the transition to a new genre, he adds. “And if we’re known for anything, it’s that we kind of know our way around tech. And we have people who are really passionate about modern games, so we didn’t have to relearn everything from the ground up.”
Stormdivers is as much an experiment with the battle royale as an embracing of it, the idea being to “bring our own flavour to genres that are slightly more modern”, in the words of head of selfpublishing Mikael Haveri. The three classes offer unique movement abilities and have access to such exotic tools as a footprint radar and life steal. The tempo of each battle is also more complex than in PUBG or Fortnite. Rather than just a shrinking safe area which slowly forces scattered players into close quarters, Stormdivers is designed around procedural weather events and climate shifts, from tornadoes to fog banks that impose nighttime conditions.
Housemarque has also come up with its own spin on monetisation and progression. “I personally hate loot boxes,” Markus says. “It’s a contentious topic at the office; there’s money in it, but they’re so damn immoral. So there will be no loot boxes. That’s one of the first aspects as a designer I wanted to tackle – how can we reward players for actually doing well, as opposed to looking at an Excel sheet and saying, ‘When was the last time this guy got a random reward?’” In place of crates or traditional unlocks, Housemarque’s system distributes cosmetic gear across maps which can be acquired permanently by completing micro-objectives, such as fighting only with a sword. Polish off all the objectives and the item is yours, but you have a chance of earning it regardless if you’ve obtained specific power-ups.
Housemarque may let players pay for re rolls in the latter case, and is also toying with selling certain items through a microtransaction store. It’s a peculiar mix of approaches, governed by the principle that rewards should require guile rather than patience or pocket money. “You will find the items, then try to survive,” Haveri notes. “If you get a rare item you’re going to be shitting your pants… you might need to play very differently.” It’s also another gamble – Housemarque doesn’t have access to detailed insights on spending habits in battle-royale games. “It’s not as well thought through as it probably would be in a company that has the data,” Markus says. “It’s based on a hunch, as a gamer. What would I like to see?”
Stormdivers will launch in 2019, and if Housemarque fans remain divided, internal tests with select players have been encouraging. “We had comments like, ‘This is pure ass, Housemarque is dead to me’,” Markus recalls. “But a week later, it’s, ‘OK, I gave it a go and I can kind of see what you’re doing.’ And a month later, they’re shitting on us for not having realistic-enough recoil.”
Housemarque still adores arcade games and would happily have carried on developing them