Mountaintop Studios announced a new developer update video for Spectre Divide, offering a sneak peek at “Flashpoint,” the title’s first major seasonal content update. It’s coming in mid-February along with a version of the game for console players.

The three-versus-three multiplayer tactical shooter will debut worldwide on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in February. The game had an unusual anime art style and interesting tactics where players had a second body that they could deploy and move to during a match. But the launch was tough.

In addition to quality-of-life optimizations for PC players, Mountaintop will continue to focus on adding new content features for Season 1, making QOL improvements requested by PC players, as well finalizing the development of console versions. Weekly playtests for the functionality are currently underway, and interested players can sign up here to participate.

Spectre Divide looked promising as it showed off the game in the summer and launched the title on August 1. But it had a lot of bugs, including some that caused system crashes. The team had a layoff but there are still a lot of folks working on it and trying to improve the experience for players, said Nate Mitchell, CEO of Mountaintop, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Mitchell, who was a cofounder of Oculus, started Mountaintop in 2020 with game designer Lee Horn and the title has been in the works for four years. Mountaintop raised $30 million and then went quiet as the team figured out what to make. They built a team of 70 people, and enlisted the help of gaming influencer Shroud, an expert player who helped them with features that players would love. Their goal was to build a tactical shooter game that people would play for 10,000 hours. 

I played the game and it was reminiscent of Counter-Strike, a game that the team loved. But it had a twist. In Spectre Divide, Mountaintop created Duality, where you have two bodies controlled by one player. You can play as one character in a 3v3 match, and then place your second character in a strategic or secret spot by tossing a puck at the spot.

Then you can instantly switch between characters. If one of the spectres is killed, you automatically switch to the other one. You get the benefit of one mind, two bodies. It’s an innovation that just might enable the game to grab its own audience of dedicated fans in the highly competitive FPS market.

A rough start

It launched in early September, but, as noted, there were numerous problems. On September 26, the company laid off 13 of its people.

“It’s no secret, we got off to a bumpy start. The game went down on launch day. That was brutal, especially for players who were super excited to play. We had performance issues, especially on a wider diversity of hardware than we tested,” Mitchell said. “In the beta, we had more regions online, more people with networking challenges, connection challenges. We weren’t running servers all over the world. We heard that feedback loud and clear.”

In the wake of the layoffs, Mitchell said the company has had to do the fixes with a smaller team. It’s goal is to focus on getting to profitability, which is a must for an indie studio that is self-publishing, he said.

“We have to make ends meet. We hope that’s better than break even on running the studio and running the game, but ultimately, we’ve got to make some profit, and so that’s really the focus for us. We are looking at how we make sure that we can sustain the team we have.”

There was also pricing feedback as well.

“The bones are the same, the core is the same, but everything really has been tuned up and improved based on what players want to see,” Horn said.

On Steam, the number of players has been about a million so far. The concurrency is low with about 1,000 players playing, compared to a peak of 81,000 four months ago, as the company has slowed its marketing and is in the midst of fixing the game. The team considered taking the game off the market but it saw there are players who were having fun and running tournaments and so it didn’t make sense to take the game away from them, Mitchell said.

Horn said, “We really want players to know that we believe in the game and we are trying to improve it. And so by continuing to update it like we’re here on Discord, they can chat with us, and we’re not going anywhere. We are improving it every day.”

Regrouping

The team’s goal was to make the title feel like a brand new game when players came back for Season 1, Horn said in an interview with GamesBeat.

“It’s not just a couple of tweets here and there. We’ve spent a lot of time after launch listening to player feedback. And part of the reason we did this is we’re going to take some more time to do Season 1,” Horn said. “It was clear we needed to do it in a big way that really hit on all the feedback and felt like that substantial change.”

“One of the biggest changes that we’re very excited about is we’re adding sprint,” Horn said. “Anytime there’s a new movement mechanic, that is a major game shift. One of the pieces of feedback we got was that it was slow to rotate and felt sluggish. We actually found that sprint just opens up the game.”

He added, “You actually get more team play out of it, which is pretty crazy to say from a mechanic, but the net result is your team is together more you’re able to support your team. You can flank and get into position, you can rotate and get behind. We’re very excited about sprint, and that is like a great example of a feature that takes some time to refine. We don’t want to just jam it in there.”

New “Flashpoint” Season 1 Content

Like in The Hunger Games, there are sponsors in the game that can send you things to give you an advantage in battle. The new one for the update is Monark Tactical, and there’s a new map coming called Canal, which will let the team show off more of its sci-fi worldbuilding, Horn said.

There are also new characters, weapon skins, and cosmetics.

Horn said the sponsor will give you a “combat escape,” which is a shield that can protect you as you activate it.

The company said the Season 1 Battle Pass offers tons of value including more than 70 total rewards. Players can earn more than a dozen free items including four character outfits, two weapon skins, and 10 additional goodies.

There are updates to the original maps to create better lanes around where you expect enemies to be and more readability. And there will be a major reduction in the price of cosmetics. Horn said that the controller gameplay has been in the works for a long time and team plays with it all of the time now. The company decided its ready and so the controller can be used for the console or the PC versions.

Horn said the team has good backend tools and it can see crash rates and performance on different hardware specs. That helps identify problems. The company also communicates with players on Discord and Reddit. It also has a group of trusted playtesters who have been helping for a couple of years. The team has responded to thousands of Steam reviews. Overall reviews among the 18,740 reviews is mixed, with a rating of three out of five stars.

More information on Flashpoint and Console launch will be shared in future updates, coming in February.

Under development

Here’s a full list of the changes currently under development. They include game health and quality of life updates, meaning fewer crashes. There’s also a new “sprint” movement mechanic, fresh sandbox rebalancing, new economy tuning (where cosmetics will cost a lot less per item than in the past), existing maps updated to improve gunplay and updated and improved base facial models.

On top of that, there will be a long awaited “Careers” tab, infrastructure improvements, client and server performance upgrades, improved networking and new server regions world-wide, thousands of fixes shipped since launch based on player feedback, faster and snappier combat and movement and visual overhauls for a more vibrant game. Anti-cheat has undergone months of tuning and advancements making major gains in detection and banning. And the observer mode has launched.

“We’re trying to be transparent with players. We’ve been sort of quiet. We did a post that basically said, ‘Hey, we’re going to really focus on adding to the game.’ So the dev video is really to say, ‘Check out all the things we’re doing. It’s a pretty extensive list,’” Mitchell said.