Before the discharge of Destiny 2: Beyond Light, there was a vital weapon on the coronary heart of the sport – the controversial, wonderful, badly-judged grenade launcher, The Mountaintop.
The gun – the form of factor you’d brag to your mates about when you managed to safe one in your stock – was one of some particular ‘Pinnacle’ weapons that Bungie added to the sport to enliven Destiny 2’s early seasonal content material mannequin. You may get one in all these particular weapons by spending hours, possibly even days, grinding out unforgiving challenges in a few of the title’s lesser-populated playlists (hey, Crucible and Gambit!). Your reward? A novel weapon with distinctive utility.
Was it value it? Yes. Amongst all the ‘Pinnacle’ armaments, The Mountaintop was essentially the most (in)well-known. It was a one-shot kill in PvP. Its splash injury was absurd. In PvE, it may make chum out of provides in seconds. For the competitively-inclined FPS fan, The Mountaintop is a factor of legend.
Fitting, then, that Mountaintop Studios has ex-Destiny expertise inside it. Its very title appears like a mission assertion, then. ‘Remember that Destiny gun that you just cherished? That you needed to compete for? The represented the PvP cream of the crop? You’re going to consider that each time you see our title’. This isn’t simply me clutching at straws looking for a hyperlink, both – the studio’s newly-updated web site presents a reasonably indeniable assertion of intent.
“Bringing gamers collectively by means of unforgettable challenges,” it says in large letters on the header. “Games with 10,000 hours of depth,” it says elsewhere. The workforce outlines that it desires to “have a good time the pursuit of mastery, and reward gamers for his or her time”. The outdated Destiny obsessive in me will get tingles from this. But is all of it simply lip-service?
Yes, Mountaintop Studios boasts the ex-COO of Double Fine, ex-gameplay leads of CS:GO and Age of Empires, animators from The Last of Us and Uncharted, PvP artisans from LoL and Valorant, neighborhood leads from Street Fighter and Overwatch… however typically with these ‘supergroup’ studios, the video games they launch are lower than the sum of their components.
Remember Marcus ‘Halo’ Lehto’s disappointing Disintegration – the sport that induced studio V1 Interactive to close down lower than a 12 months post-launch? Glen Schofield (Dead Space, Call of Duty) over-promised and under-delivered when it got here to final 12 months’s The Callisto Protocol, which boasted “about 25 to 30 former coworkers from Visceral Games and Sledgehammer Games”. Then there was Scavengers; staffed by ex-Halo devs, it was Midwinter Entertainment/Improbable’s doomed PvPvE experiment that didn’t even make it to console earlier than being shut down.
But, for all of the parables towards establishing new studios away from the triple-A publishing behemoths, there are examples of learn how to do it proper. Ben Brode and the Hearthstone gang made a large influence with Second Dinner and Marvel Snap. And ex-Infinity Ward workers created Respawn, in fact, which has gone on to be one of the prestigious names within the FPS style. And, forward of us, there’s each Immortals of Aveum (Bret Robbins, once more, of Call of Duty and Dead Space fame) and Arc Raiders (ex-DICE).
Perhaps, alongside the oldsters at Mountaintop, this new period of supergroup devs – all placing out and making an attempt one thing new away from the publishing homes that incubated them – can eke out a brand new period of gaming, one which proves that you just don’t want all that Microsoft or Activision or Blizzard or Riot cash behind you so as to succeed. For what it’s value, Mountaintop’s cash, principally, comes from VC joints like Spark Capital, Founders Fund, and Detroit Venture Partners. So far, the sport has raised no less than $35 million.
The odds could also be stacked towards them, however Mountaintop (by its personal admission) desires to expertise the “highs and lows of overcoming the inconceivable” to “create friendships that final a lifetime”. We’ll discover out quickly whether or not it’s obtained the chops to do it.
