Today’s Stadia Connect featured multiple exclusive first-looks and reveals, and even some exclusive games for the service. Among these wasOutcasters,the collaboration between Splash Damage (Halo: Master Chief Collection,Gears Tactics) and Google Stadia. When it was announced in March, thecollaboration between Stadia and the shooter developerindicated that Google was taking criticisms about Stadia’s library to heart and slowly but surely moving in the right direction.
Outcastersis a top-down, eight-player multiplayer shooter that features customizable Funko Pop-looking characters that fight it out in one of two game modes using a unique shooting mechanic that Splash Damage is calling the “curve shot.”
While the game might have the look and camera-angle of a simplified MOBA, the game’s product manager, Lily Zhu, said that it draws from the studio’s history of working on multiplayer shooters and its origins as aQuakemodding team in aninterview with DualShockers.
The game’s pervasive core mechanic that’s found throughout every game mode and loadout is the curve shot. The curve shot is a departure from the standard shooters the studio has worked on in the past where the main shot from every character will have a unique trajectory and curve to it. While more information about new modes and unlockables is set to be announced at a later date, Splash Damage has announced two different game modes so far.
Gold Rush resemblesMario Kart’s Coin Battle mode, with players running around a map collecting coins and then depositing them into a point on the map called the “piggy bank.” The other mode that they revealed, Last Caster Standing, draws inspiration from the omnipresent battle royale genre; it’s a free-for-all between the eight players in the round where the map gets smaller as time goes on.
For more information about the game, including the origins of the game, we conducted an interview with Lily Zhu, the product lead onOutcasters, Richard Jolly, Splash Damage’s CEO, and Nico Zettler, a producer at Stadia. You can check that outright here.
