Theorycraft Games has revealed Supervive, a new battle royale game previously codenamed Project Loki. The neon-apocalyptic hero BR game is the company’s first game, and it will debut in open beta in late 2024.
Supervive is set in an improvisational action sandbox where strategic, explosive shootouts meet a new era of storm chasing hunters — all with the aim of becoming the world’s next “10,000-hour game” for competitive squads.
In celebration, Theorycraft is hosting their largest public playtest from June 27 to July 4. Players can pre-register here. I played a demo of the game, and then I interviewed Jessica Nam, executive producer of Supervive. I think it’s got some pretty amazing action and plays like a polished and balance MOBA — one that looks like it was made by a team with a lot more people.
Supervive details
Supervive is a free-to-play, squad-based hero battle royale where players team up in groups of two or four to battle enemies across a vast, sky-bound map while a deadly storm encroaches upon them.
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Players engage in dynamic combat, complete objectives, and use unique powers and equipment to devise creative strategies to outplay other teams and be the last squad standing. Supervive will always be free-to-play and is designed to ensure that cosmetics are the only in-game purchases, with no pay-for-power elements, ever, the company said.
“We left the security of our triple-A jobs and founded Theorycraft to make a big bet on ourselves, to see if we could make the deepest games in the world, and to develop in a new way—out in the open with real players from day one,” said Theorycraft CEO, Joe Tung. “It’s been a wild ride to get to this point and we are proud to present Supervive as our first shot across the bow. We’re beyond grateful for our existing community and are super excited to welcome in new players.”
An improvisational action sandbox
Supervive embraces open-ended abilities, powers, items, and world interactions, as well as physics-based combat and movement, allowing for expressive and intuitive action and traversal.
The combat and movement is easy to pick up, but also allows for endless depth and challenge in optimization. You can play it with friends. Players can choose a number of ways to play, including a 4-player squad, 10 teams per lobby battle royale; a 2-per-squad duos battle royale with 20 teams; and 4v4 deathmatches.
Your aim is to build your team of storm chasing hunters. There are currently 15 hunters available, with more in-development for launch. While hunters do fall into one of three major archetypes (fighters, controllers, and supports), all are designed to be self-sufficient playmakers. All hunters have unique abilities (4 abilities, 1 ultimate, and a passive) and are all unlocked through regular play.
In this game, you’re never out until you’re out. There are many ways to bring your team back, including team-wide resurrection beacons, picking up downed allies in the middle of a fight, and even the ability to revive dead allies after the action has settled. That combined with Supervive’s high lethality and playmaking depth, it’s always possible to make that winning play.
Supervive has map-based objectives and storm shifts. Each game can feature a random ‘storm shift’ that alters game variables—such as bullet trains, which place three high-speed, lethal trains on the map; nomadic storms, which move the available playspace across large distances; and more! Unique biome-specific monsters, bosses, and other game-changing mechanics come together for a world of systematic anarchy.
Beyond Launch, Theorycraft will forever be developing the game alongside the community – and the work won’t stop at launch. Expect new hunters, new storm shifts, new biomes, new powers, and lots, lots more—all for free.
More details about the public playtest can be found on the site here. Playtest slots are limited due to server constraints, so Theorycraft is employing a unique Twitch Drops campaign where players who watch more streams of Supervive have a higher chance of being selected to playtest.
The demo and the interview
I played around as a sniper, and it was pretty good for taking out some players at close range, but when they got really close, I was in trouble. It’s such a small map for snipers so I could have chosen better. I didn’t get any one-shot kills, which was a little disappointing. But I still enjoyed it. I found it easy to maneuver with the WASD keys and jump around with the space bar. And then figure out the action.
“That’s definitely one of those things where we’re also trying to strike the balance of the shots you expect versus the shots you don’t expect off screen and things like that,” Nam said.
She said that fluidity and high agency is very important and crucial to the game.
“We think that’s part of what makes you be able to make that solo play” more enjoyable, she said. The devs want people to feel that agency and effectiveness in the game, regardless of what class they are playing.
You need the freedom to be able to traverse and use your momentum in different ways and that fluidity to make the flashy plays,” Nam said. “We call her a mobile sniper” because she can move around a lot while shooting. she can, for instance, turn around while fleeing and catch opponents off guard with high damage shots.
I enjoyed how you can fly over gaps and concentrate on making sure you make it across a chasm. But that’s also a perfect time to turn around and surprise your pursuers. You can launch a further surprise by using your “ultimate” against them.
Of course, there are other characters like Tanks that can protect the sniper too. I asked Nam how the game design compared to League of Legends, where many of the Theorycraft people have their roots. Nam said they see Supervive as a kind of genre blend or mashup of games.
That includes the strategy of MOBAs like League of Legends, the shooting mastery and fast action of shooters, and the dynamism of platform fighters.
“We put it together into this kind of mashup. And that’s how we’ve been describing this game because we don’t really want to be beholden to specific genre constraints as we’re designing a competitive game from the ground up,” Nam said. “Those are the kind of building blocks that we’ve been talking about and been inspired by.”
I played on a mouse and keyboard, as the team is still figuring out its controller options before committing to one solution, Nam said.
I asked if you could fall into the chasms that you jump over. You should be able to cross with any dash, she said, for the shorter chasms. But the longer ones require you to pull out your glider and use it.
As to where the game stands now, Nam said, “It’s dependent on how the community responds to the game. I think we’re feeling pretty good being in the alpha, and we love the shape of the game. I think we’ve seen some really good community response, and it’s just been growing over time. We’ll want to see how this June announce goes and see how people respond to the refinements that we made to the game.”
Nam said the team wants “good landing pads” for people coming in from other types of games. She doesn’t want to force people to memorize a lot of news stuff all at once. So far, she is pleased with how fast people pick up the game.
“We want to make sure we have a good variety of gameplay that can serve as those landing pads,” she said. “We’ve thought about creating a combat sandbox that makes it a little bit more intuitive to not have to create a lot of different, really deterministic rules to create game variants.”
She said the team is targeting late 2024 for the open beta launch.