Splitgate Beta Season 2 – Building a better shooter for the future

When it launched into open beta last year, Splitgate was a crushing success. A free to play multiplayer shooter that takes liberal inspiration from Halo and Portal? Yeah, that’s a game that’s going to have its servers be completely overloaded if it catches the right people’s attention at the right time. 1047 Games had a surprise hit on their hands, and with that burst of interest, they’ve set about turning their plucky indie upstart into a game that can really challenge the AAA behemoths of the genre.

Splitgate Beta Season 2 is kicking off tomorrow on Thursday 2nd June, and is the next step on that path. The central attraction is the complete overhaul of one of the most popular maps already in the game – the thinking being that it’s better to spend time and effort that’s guaranteed to succeed than waste it on a brand new map that’s only possibly going to be good.

To say that Abyss has been given a fresh lick of paint is a pretty reductive way of putting it, as 1047’s expanded art team has gone over every element, subtly shifting the theme away from its vaguely Mayan theme, to something more generic, but with greater detail and contrast packed into it. A waterfall in one area is no longer just a wobbly transparency, and now has more realistic water vapour kicked up as it cascades down rocks, foliage has higher detail, and there’s more contrast through the environment lighting. Along the way, 1047 has also tweaked and modified parts of the layout, adjusting the open spaces to try and foster great arena shooter battling, but without losing the muscle memory for the map layout that players have already built up.

In a similar vein, there’s also a pair of familiar, but modernised game modes. Hot Zone is a refreshed King of the Hill that aims to keep fights for each hill as intense as possible. Hills no longer move after a set period of time, with points scored for time held, but must be captured in their own right. It’s a good, solid shift for the game mode that makes it feel more competitive throughout, keeping the score lower and the feeling that you can make a comeback and win alive.

The same principles have also been applied to Lockdown’s twist on the classic Domination. Instead of having three fixed capture zones where you score a point per second for each zone held, or score when you hold the majority, the aim is to capture and hold all three zones together, scoring a point when you’re able to do so. It’s the same twist on the old formula as Halo Infinite’s BTB Total Control mode, but shrunk down to the tight 4v4 battles of Splitgate.

Both game modes work really nicely in how they take classic game modes and revitalise them for modern competitive play. The closer looking scorelines mean you don’t feel quite so downtrodden if you go a couple points behind,

Then there’s Juggernaut, which is a fun free-for-all party mode. Being added to the FFA Brawl playlist, it picks a player at random to be the Juggernaut, giving them 2.5x the health and has boosted running speed, but stripping them of their ability to portal. The winner is decided by who can be the Juggernaut for the longest, with everyone out to catch and take down the Juggernaut in order to earn the marker for themselves. It’s a good bit of fun.

Truth be told, my playing time with Splitgate prior to this hands-on has been fairly limited, but I was impressed with what I played in and around this preview event. Splitgate is a tight arena shooter that’s really starting to find its own identity, beyond the obvious Halo and Portal inspirations. It will take time to really master the game’s portalling mechanics, figuring out the lines of sight and the ability to chain portal jumps together being key for anyone that wants to play in more competitive playlists, but you don’t really need to engage with this to have fun.

Behind the scenes, 1047 has also been reengineering the game’s server structure to scale much, much better than it did at release last year, and speeding up matchmaking in general. The latter point is the more important one right now, as the game population has (quite naturally) reverted to a more sustainable normality after its burst of popularity last summer. They’re shoring up the foundations for future peaks.

One other great feature to have in Splitgate is the map maker that was introduced with the first season earlier this year. For Season 2 there’s a new base map, Ocean, which is bigger and has actual topographical variation, instead of being just a flat open space. There’s new trees, foliage and other items being added to it for creations, and a quality of life feature in the form of snapping. The biggest improvement, though, is the ability to share maps with a generated code. It’s a long way short of a custom map browser, but will hugely help the map making scene in the game.

Splitgate Beta Season 2 is another step along that path toward individuality. The battle pass has some new character models that look more like the future blood sports characters you might expect, and there are things like changing the name of the Battle Rifle that are being considered for the future. However, I do feel that 1047 will need to really kick on after Season 2, though, pushing for new maps or at least a larger body of significantly improved content to show that they’re making serious progress toward a full launch.

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• Source: https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2022/06/01/splitgate-beta-season-2-building-a-better-shooter-for-the-future/