In the avalanche of trailers at this year’s Game Awards, Splitgate 2 got a brief moment to shine. The shooter sequel showed off a clip that highlighted its portal-based action and teased a new mode. There was one detail nestled in there, though, that your eye may have glazed over. It isn’t just launching on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S; it’ll launch on PS4 and Xbox One too. It’s a decision that’s becoming rarer and rarer over four years into this current console generation.
Following the Game Awards, I caught up with 1047 Games CEO Ian Proulx to break down the details of the new trailer. While we talked about a range of topics, from what the studio learned from the game’s first beta to what to expect from its new mode, we spent a lot of time getting into the nuances of developing a cross-generational game. While you might assume that studios would be eager to develop for only the most powerful tech to push performance, Proulx explains how developing around older systems ultimately benefits PC players.
Staying cross-gen
Compared to its predecessor, which started its life as a small-scale indie project, Splitgate 2 is an enormous production. Proulx says that it has five times the content as its predecessor and is delivering polished visuals that make it look like a AAA game. With a grand vision for it laid out from the start of production, 1047 Games was faced with a hard choice about what platforms to launch it on as it would likely land awkwardly in the middle of this current console generation.
“That was a heated debate two years ago. I’ll tell you, a lot of artists didn’t want to do last gen!” Proulx tells Digital Trends. “But for me, there’s a couple of reasons we wanted to stick to last-gen as well as current-gen. One is that we want to have as big of a player base as possible, and the reality is that there are still a lot of players on last-gen. The second reason is the social aspect of it. Let’s say that by the time we launch that even 25% of players are still on last-gen, if I’m in a four-stack and I’ve got my squad, if one of my buddies is on last-gen, we’re sticking to a game we all play.”
Proulx believes that it’s still worth shipping a game so long as the percentage of active PS4 or Xbox One users is in the double digits. That’s a no-brainer, but it’s not the only reason that Splitgate 2 is going cross-gen. A big part of that came back to PC players. The team was determined to optimize its shooter so well for PC players that someone could run it in “potato mode” and still run at 60 frames per second.
Doing that would require sacrifices, but they were ones the team was willing to make after some testing. Proulx recalls a story that echoes a thought many gamers have likely had during Sony and Microsoft’s latest console generation: all those flashy tech features just might not be worth it.
“We actually had our lead lighting artist do a presentation. Show us a comparison between different lighting solutions,” Proulx says. “So we took Abyss, a map from Splitgate that we remastered, and ask what it looked like using the old-school lighting method? What’s the performance? Show me some screenshots. Now do it with Lumen. Do it with all the fancy features, optimize it as best we can, and show me a before and after. What’s your frame rate? Then we had a big conversation, and it was just pretty clear. ‘All right guys, this was a fun exercise, but you can’t tell me that that screenshot looks that much better to justify cutting the frame rate.”
“I have not upgraded my own PC. I have a 1080.”
Maintaining performance was paramount to the team. Proulx believes that Splitgate players come to the series for gameplay first and foremost, not visuals. Smooth performance and fast movement were what helped the original become a breakout success, and the team wasn’t willing to lose that. Proulx is so serious about that, in fact, that he uses an eight-year-old PC at home.
“As game developers, everyone has these crazy PCs so it’s easy to get in the habit of ‘I don’t feel the personal pain that the players do because I have a 4090,’” Proulx says. “So, by saying you have to hit 60 frames per second on a PS4 and an Xbox One, that’s going to set the bar. If you can hit 60 on an Xbox One, you can hit 60 on a crappy PC. One of the things I’ve done to help force this is that I have not upgraded my own PC. I have a 1080. It’s really good for 2016! I like to feel that personal pain so I can complain about it so that I can do something about it.”
That doesn’t mean that the team isn’t going to push the game on high-powered machines. Proulx notes that while the team hasn’t experimented with the PS5 Pro yet, he’s eager to tool around with it. He believes it should be easy to give it a boost thanks to Unreal Engine but admits that it’s probably more complicated than just flipping some switches.
Still to come
While Splitgate 2 is scheduled to launch next year, there’s still plenty of work left to do on it. Last year, 1047 held its first alpha for the shooter. I participated in it and found that the shooter already felt like it was in great shape, even in a limited view of it, but the team found a lot of room for improvement. Since then, it’s been working to tweak features like time to kill. The team had previously experimented with making it faster than it was in the last game, but it’s now dialing it back a bit based on alpha feedback. It’s also adding some more portal controls, as players will get the option to close each portal individually. One of the more significant changes you can expect to see in its next test, though, is way more portal-friendly surfaces.
“Part of our design goals this time around was to have portal walls that were more intentional and useful,” Proulx says. “There were some walls in Splitgate that never got used. But we probably went a little too far in thinking every single portal wall must be perfectly placed, and this time we’ve gone back to the alpha maps and added a bunch of portal walls, some portal jumps, more momentum, more floor portals. Just give players more options.”
Some of the bigger features coming to the sequel are still being kept under wraps. Watch its Game Awards trailer and you might catch a glimpse at an unfamiliar mode. Proulx gave us a small hint of what that is, teasing a mass multiplayer mode that has already become the most popular option within 1047.
“We have a new mode. We’re not really talking too much about it; we’re going to show more about it in the new year. But it’s the largest-scale thing we’ve ever done. Twenty-four players, three teams of eight. That’s all we’re going to say about it for now, but it’s very, very fun.”
Splitgate 2 launches in 2025 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
