Fourteen years ago, Ian Proulx wasn’t happy. He’d just bought Halo Reach and, when confronted with the new spread of abilities available to Spartans, was worried that them sprinting all over the place and evade-rolling was taking away from the spirit of good old fashioned Halo. Fast forward to today, and in a twist of fate, he’s now a co-founder and CEO of a video game development company, and his peers at 1047 Games have found themselves adding abilities and (gasp) factions to Splitgate 2. How the tables have turned.
The original Splitgate was absolutely an homage to those halcyon days of old school Halo, albeit with a portal and momentum twist that enraptured FPS fans back when it dropped in 2019. While the series began as the work of 25 people in a dorm, its sequel Splitgate 2 is a far bigger and better funded product. While many things are changing, Proulx told me last month at Gamescom that a core spread of Splitgate fundamentals had to stay the same. Gunplay, portals, and a distinct fun vibe. But still, something had to change.
“A big [weakness] was meaningful variety with a purpose,” Proulx explains. “In Splitgate, everyone is exactly the same. There are 20 different game modes, but they’re all different flavours of the same thing. It was super fun, but what we saw were players would come in, have a great time for three or four weeks, and then they’d run out of things to do.”
About Author
