Closing The Loop
Lemnis Gate looks to the past, present and future of the firstperson shooter
Lemnis Gate is evolving the sci-fi firstperson shooter one loop at a time… after time
What can you achieve within 25 seconds, really? In multiplayer shooter terms, it might be long enough to land a couple of headshots or (more often, at least in our case) to sprint from a spawn point, trying to rejoin the action before it moves on. In Lemnis Gate, though, 25 seconds is the length of an entire round, the duration of your character’s entire existence. Fortunately, you get more than one shot at it.
Once the countdown hits zero, you simply pick a different character class – ‘operatives’, in Lemnis Gate’s parlance – and play out those same seconds from a fresh perspective. And again, and again, your new actions layered atop everything you did before until there’s a full team of five fighting side by side, all controlled by a single player. So, yes, it’s another example of this season’s must-have gaming accessory, the time loop. But to understand what makes Lemnis Gate such a joyously unusual experience, it’s probably more useful to think of it as a turn-based shooter.
There’s an extra step that needs to be inserted into the version of events above. At the end of each loop, before you start over with your next operative, play passes to your opponent. They study what you made of those 25 seconds, and try to think of a way to undo it. So, say you sent a scout to snatch an objective and run it back to base, scoring the first point of the match. Your opponent might counter with their sniper, catching the scout with a well-aimed headshot to wipe him – and that scored point – off the timeline before he can ever touch the objective. Or perhaps they sneak their engineer to your goal line, awaiting the scout’s return with a freshly planted crop of turrets.
James Anderson, co-founder of Ratloop Games Canada and Lemnis Gate game director, likens it to chess: there’s a limited selection of pieces, with each move a reaction to the current state of play and, ideally, an anticipation of what’s next. “Using your mind is as powerful as using your weapons,” he promises. The idea is to reward a clever idea and careful planning as much as twitch reflexes or time-honed mastery. And, as the studio enters an arena dominated by experienced competition, Ratloop is hoping those same values – a clever idea and careful planning – can level the playing field not just within its game, but in the world outside too.
Lemnis Gate is the second game from Ratloop Games Canada, and the one it has been working towards since the studio was founded in 2017. “We knew this was the idea that was going to help us differentiate ourselves from competitors,” says Vivian Yen, Ratloop’s CEO and producer on Lemnis Gate. The studio’s previous title,
Vroom Kaboom – a mix of deckbuilder, tower defence and car combat – was a smaller-scale production, and Yen now positions it as something of a practice run.
Ratloop describes Lemnis Gate as a ‘triple-I’ production, one of those rare games made in the squeezed middle between blockbuster and arthouse. It’s a difficult space for a multiplayer shooter to exist within – as plenty of other developers have discovered of late. Ninja Theory, one of the studios which helped popularise the term with Hellblade, stepped away from development of Bleeding Edge earlier this year after the team shooter/brawler hybrid struggled to find an audience, even with the support of Microsoft behind it. Meanwhile, Disintegration, the first multiplayer shooter from Take Two’s triple-I publishing label Private Division, closed its servers just a few months after launch.
Lemnis Gate is being made by a small team with far fewer resources than most FPS studios have at their disposal. But, as those other games have shown, players don’t set their expectations for an online shooter according to its budget – and Yen is well aware of that. “We’ll be competing against triple-A shooters just because they exist, and it’s the same people who will want to play these games,” she says. “And knowing that, we decided to see where we can best compete.”
This is where the time loop concept comes in. While a shooter’s graphical chops might be dependent on the number of artists working away behind the scenes, the value of a good idea doesn’t necessarily scale up with headcount. In fact, Anderson argues, Ratloop might actually be better positioned to make something experimental. “We have the capability to take bigger risks, potentially, than some of the big triple-A studios,” he says. “As an indie, we’re pretty agile, and can make something I don’t think they would be able to.”
This inability to take risks, as Anderson sees it, has slowed the genre’s evolution. “You look at the classic model for an FPS, and you have very old-school games, like Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke 3D. Since those games were invented, the fundamental mechanics of a shooter haven’t really changed that much. We have new game modes and things like battle royale, but those are kind of high-level changes to the structure of the game,” he says. “We wanted to invent something new, that fundamentally changed the way that a firstperson shooter played.”
Lemnis Gate’s concept, it should be noted, isn’t quite unique. As a time loop shooter, Deathloop might be the obvious comparison, but there’s another which lands much closer to the target: Quantum League. Developed in parallel to Ratloop’s game, by a comparably sized team in Argentina, it’s another online shooter where you build a team from your own time-displaced clones.