Supervive's Clever Genre Blend Created the Only Battle Royale I've ...

Sometimes a game comes out and declares itself the new pinnacle of a genre or spins a series/genre in a new direction, like Breath of the Wild did for the Zelda franchise in 2017. Sometimes a game comes out and does something wholly new, like Demon's Souls kicking off what we now call Souls-like or Soulsborne games. Supervive manages to do a little of both. 

Supervive is the debut title from Theorycraft Games, made by developers who previously worked on games like League of Legends, Fortnite, Apex Legends and Destiny 2. It's a battle-royale-by-way-of-MOBA: 10 to 20 teams fight it out on an ever-shrinking map, but instead of the usual first- or third-person shooter style, players choose from characters with unique abilities, controlled by an angled overhead camera.

It's a weird game at first glance, but that weirdness has fulfilled a gaming wish I've had for years. I've dabbled in MOBAs, or multiplayer online battle arenas, like League of Legends and Smite, drawn in by character concepts and art design. And though I've enjoyed firing off abilities as various champions, the overall gameplay has never quite landed for me. Battle royale games like Fortnite or Apex Legends were a similar experience -- interesting from the outside, but the actual gameplay wasn't as enjoyable as I'd hoped.

Through some act of game development alchemy, Theorycraft has created a game that takes the elements I liked and transforms them into a game that feels somehow new and familiar simultaneously. That's important for a title that aims to be the next game you spend 1,000 or even 10,000 hours playing. 

I spoke with Executive Producer Jessica Nam over email ahead of the open beta launch and asked what makes Supervive ready to deliver on that promise. She told me that, for starters, the game already has some players who have put almost 1,000 hours into Supervive already during the game's years-long development. 

"Of all the things that make me believe we're making a deep game worthy of time and investment, [the biggest is] that we've been play-testing every month with thousands of players, and we've been acting on their feedback to invest in depth above all else," Nam said.

Supervive follows a lot of familiar battle royale conventions: You team up with a duo or four-person squad. You drop into a large map with varied terrain, rummage around for items and fight for your survival as a storm steadily shrinks the map's playable area. Along the way, you encounter teams of other players competing for the same loot or map space. Eventually, one squad is left standing. 

As with Apex Legends, you'll be choosing a hero with unique abilities that'll help you along the way. Those abilities include familiar effects like stuns, dashes, barriers and other utility abilities such as healing teammates and providing map vision.

But Supervive also does things a bit differently. Unlike in battle royale shooters, your character levels up during the course of the game. You drop in at level 1 and can reach up to level 10 by the end of a match. You gain levels by fighting creeps -- small NPC monsters that spawn at various places throughout the map -- and other players. As you level up, you unlock more abilities and upgrades to those abilities, making your hunter stronger. There's a day and night cycle with corresponding level caps (with a soft cap at level 4 for the first day) that keeps anyone from totally steamrolling in the early game.

Creeps, leveling and item upgrades that improve your hunter's stats are all familiar elements from MOBA games, but the difference in Supervive is that you aren't locked into a 30-minute game the way you might end up in League of Legends. The longest Supervive matches I've been a part of all wrapped up in about 15 minutes. And if you're eliminated earlier than that, you can immediately queue up for another match.

To me, this is the real magic of Supervive: It uses the strengths of the battle royale genre to shore up the frustrations with MOBAs -- once you're out, you're out. You aren't stuck in games where you have no real way to win. And gaining levels while fighting creeps nicely solved my complaints about the downtime in other battle royale games. Skirmishes in Supervive also feel faster than the resource-trading slugfest that MOBAs can sometimes feel like, which makes those skirmishes feel more exciting.

The developers are continuing to listen to feedback and make adjustments. With the open beta launch, the game is shortening the first day and adding quests to give players more to do at the start of a match. Those changes are part of a balancing act between keeping things engaging for experienced players yet still digestible for newbies. 

"Our veterans love how open-ended each game of Supervive is because they're excited by all the possibilities, while our newer players definitely want more guard rails because they don't even know what they can do," Nam said. "I'd expect as players become more familiar with the game and can now sink as many hours into Supervive as they'd like, we can slowly start moving back toward more open-ended strategic possibilities."

As excited about Supervive as I am now, I wasn't immediately sold on it. My first impression was that the game was intimidatingly ambitious -- attempting to do something exciting at the cost of having extremely high complexity. But thanks to gradual changes to gameplay and my own growing familiarity with mechanics, I've started to settle into the complex elements and can't wait for the open beta to begin.

My first experience was a conflicting look at the game, with Supervive developers leading me through an alpha build. The alpha included more-experienced players who very kindly spared newbies in the early game, allowing players like me to understand the basic mechanics and abilities while learning the map. But once players started hitting levels 5 and 6, it felt impossible to keep up, even with the expert guidance of my Supervive dev. I left the play-test liking the idea of the game but feeling overwhelmed by the current state. 

I took a second crack at things on my own about a month later. I hoped that playing the game in a more even environment, with more people who were similarly new to the game, would give me a fairer look at the gameplay. I felt more lost about where to go and what to do at any particular moment, but the competition wasn't as steep, which meant I got to contribute more to fights, instead of feeling like easy prey. Some of the complexity had also been streamlined, making me more optimistic that I could actually get a few of my friends into the game when the open beta hit. 

Sure enough, when the game opened up for Steam Next Fest, I queued up with a buddy and had a much more enjoyable experience. He had more familiarity with battle royale games, whereas I had more experience with MOBAs, so we guided each other through the elements that were less familiar to the other. We didn't win any games together, but we were consistently in the top 4 duos and had a pair of second-place finishes -- a massive improvement from my first experience, which made me feel like the goat left out to feed the T. rex in Jurassic Park. 

The game felt more fluid, easier to digest and just generally easier to jump into and start playing. Plus, I was starting to have enough time in the game to get a more instinctive sense of how to use my preferred hunter. By the time the Next Fest play-test was over, I was ready for open beta -- and my duo was already experiencing withdrawal. 

Those changes were the result of constant work from the Supervive devs.

"We've gone on a long journey of discovering what kind of player onboarding works for us, and we've been running small experiments almost every play-test," Nam said. "Our current philosophy is to get players as many combat reps as possible before we introduce them to all of the strategic depth of Supervive. Because combat is so unique and fast in our game, once someone understands how to fight, they tend to be much happier discovering new things." 

The Next Fest build of Supervive felt streamlined compared with earlier builds, but it was still plenty complex. Even when my buddy and I were finishing in second place, I still felt like I understood only half of what was going on with item builds, ability use and so on. That complexity will likely turn off some gamers, including those who enjoy something like Fortnite more for the pop culture collaboration or player-built game modes, or people who don't want as many things to think about as they fight their way to the center of the storm. 

If Supervive finds success, it'll be because the game found a way to keep the core gameplay (running around the map battling creeps and other players) fun enough that people want to continually come back and start to sink their hands into the deeper aspects of the game. It'll be on the strength of the character and art design, which makes players like me want to spend money on cosmetics. Adding new hunters and cosmetics shortly after launch will certainly help -- gamers love shiny new things.

Supervive's open beta will start with 16 playable hunters, but more are on the way. I asked Nam about the guiding philosophy behind designing new hunters.

She said the team wants to focus on hitting familiar archetypes and filling out the four different hunter roles, but that the first new hunter was driven more by creative inspiration. "We do want to offer more familiar kits for players coming from other games," Nam said, "but will likely always try to apply a unique stamp, whether it be a differentiated ability combo or signature ability that you can only get with Supervive."

Based on my experience, Supervive might just pull it off. 

There have been a host of game demos and launches this year aimed at the semicompetitive PvP crowd, and most of them have felt like they didn't have meaningfully new or fun things to add to the established titles in the player-versus-player genre. Supervive feels different. It has a potential that, if cultivated, could let it carve out its own niche in the ever-crowded space of online games.

I'll be playing today, duoed with a friend, learning new hunters and reveling in the only battle royale I've ever liked.