Veteran game studio Splash Damage partnered with Google to create Stadia exclusive Outcasters. With the end of Stadia, the future of those Stadia exclusives came into question. Splash Damage has finally spoken out about Outcasters‘ future. Unfortunately, they don’t have good news to share.
Outcasters is a novel take on the recently popular indie multiplayer physics games, games like Overcooked! While Splash Damage are best known for first person shooters, Outcasters is an overhead perspective multiplayer game, but still a shooter. The novel idea is that the game’s guns make curved shots. Instead of peeking out corners you run close to enemies to take them out, but you can also pick up items that will modify how your gun behaves further. Splash Damage passed on making an extensive single player campaign for multiplayer modes, leaving it up to the players to find their own fun with them.
There are two modes for Outcaser. Last Caster Standing is closest to battle royale, but at a considerably smaller scale. The ring you fight in shrinks as more enemies get taken out, and you definitely won’t be taking 30 minutes to finish a match. In Gold Rush, you get split into teams, and you collect coins as they spawn and deposit them into piggys banks, fighting a timer. Splash Damage planned even more modes but news for those modes never came up.
Splash Damage shared this message on Twitter today:
“Dear Stadians,
It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that we do not have plans to bring Outcasters to other platforms at this time.
Outcasters was designed and built exclusively for Stadia, with many of its systems heavily reliant on the platform, significantly increasing the complexity of the work required.
We still firmly believe that cloud gaming has a bright future in our industry, providing easier access to games than ever before, and we are encouraged to see that other platforms still champion this cause.
As our final thank you to all of you that supported us, we’ve put together a short video showing a rare behind-the-scenes look at the various stages of development of Outcasters, from its humble beginnings to today.
Thank you.”
It’s another rough step for Splash Damage themselves. While the studio made its name with classic multiplayer games like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the studio has struggled to get more recent hits out the door.
Its latest original game, free-to-play multiplayer shooter Dirty Bomb, ended development in 2018, when Splash Damage revealed they would no longer push updates for the game of any kind as they could no longer financially support it.
Splash Damage did manage to get some work in on some good games, having partnered with Microsoft from 2015 to 2020. Games for which they did support work for Microsoft included Gears of War 4, Gears 5, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Today, Splash Damage is owned by Tencent, but was given leeway to continue operating as an independent entity. They are working on a still unrevealed game set in an original sci-fi universe, so it isn’t all bad for the company. Still, it’s a hard pill to swallow that they just don’t have a way to get this game out of Stadia the way other games have.
Source: Twitter via VideoGamesChronicle
