A live service game with "no BS" – why the team behind Omega Strikers thinks it can last

It’s a dangerous world out there for the indie developer looking to make a splash with a new live service game. All games release at risk of failure, but the competitive multiplayer space has proved a no man's land for many a promising game over the last few years.

Omega Strikers, launching this April to all platforms, is rushing in nonetheless. With its cocktail of sports, fighting game-adjacent action and character-based teamplay, is diving headfirst towards release. I had a chance to play the game during the PC beta late last year, at which point I made note of the solid foundations at the heart of Omega Strikers.

This week, at GDC, I was able to jump in yet again, and chat to the trio of Odyssey Interactive marketing director Ryan Rigney, co-founder Richard Henkel, and fellow co-founder Dax Andrus. The game has come a long way since last year, but I wanted to grill the group on how Omega Strikers would keep people playing in the months post-launch – something that has probed to be a pitfall for many of their peers.

Their answer? A focus on gameplay, rather than the “BS” patterns you see elsewhere. That, in their mind, is what modern audiences want. “The biggest thing is, honestly, authenticity from a dev,” states Andrus. “I'll say that's something that we've been very lucky and privileged to be able to just lean on. There’s no BS in Omega Strikers: the gameplay is the thing that should sell you.”

In their eyes, another boon to Omega Strikers is crossplay between all platforms, something the team believed crucial for the accessibility and overall appeal of their game. “We're trying to do like cross platform cross progression in a way that's just easy,” Andrus elaborates. “Make everything seamless, make it so that you know what you're getting into when you play the game and it never feels like we're trying to, you know, 'nickel and dime' you along the route first for other things.”

“By being crossplatform, you can be wherever the players are. It's like people don't want to be told they have to buy a console if I want to play that game or they have to be on my phone,” Henkel adds.

But there’s one more aspect Odyssey Interactive favours highly in its bid to make a mark in this super competitive space, something the team (composed of former League of Legends staff brought with them from Riot Games) values very highly indeed: characters. Lovable and appealing characters that players can genuinely connect with.

“A big part of the fun of playing a character-based game is a relationship that you feel like you're building with a character in the game,” Andrus states excitedly. He points out Arcane, the popular League of Legends animated series, and how it made the featured characters more important to their player base.

“Our hope is we can make an IP that can last for Omega Strikers, future games we make, and we're making the first steps towards other media like anime and other things. When we create a character we keep this idea in mind; 'if this character was the main character of their own anime, could they have a full season?'”

With this laser-focus on characters, then, it should be no surpirse that the studio is going hard on character updates post-launch. “We’re aiming for three weeks per new character release, until we are at the point where we're around 20 to 25 characters, and then we intend to slow down to probably around half that rate or a little lower,” explains Andrus.

Odyssey Interactive felt that one of the weakest aspects of the Omega Strikers beta was a lack of characters, which played a part in lessening the excitement from the ~1.5 million players who jumped in last year. However, with the pace outlined above, the devs hope to bring the game to a “pretty healthy” state at around 20 playable characters.

The team is also releasing character-specific affinity levels for each playable hero, a sort of mini-battle pass that provides cosmetics and in-game currency (a-la Valorant, League of Legends, and numerous other games in the space). The trio also hinted at an anime-style visual novel for characters that they’d like to add in the future, pointing to the League of Legends 'Spirit Blossom' narrative event as an example of the sort of content they’d like to create, so players can get to know their favourite fighters even better.

As for how Odyssey intends to stop 'the Hanzo problem' – a common occurrence where players who love their specific character will lock it in regardless of what the team needs – it has faith in its design, albeit with a goal-sized caveat.

“We’ve tried to design most characters, 80% of the roster, so that they can be played in a variety of positions,” Andrus reveals. “It covers most cases. There’s also this upgrade system, which you can use to enhance your character throughout a match. This can help add flexibility.”

“The one place where this can be a challenge is the goalie role,” he confesses, smirking. “Obviously there are gonna be characters who are better at goalie than others. But that’s where we hope that players queuing for goalie are not doing so and intentionally picking a character that’s not suited for that position.”

Morale is apparently at a high right now at Odyssey Interactive as launch creeps closer. But this is, naturally, paired with a fear of how the game will be received, something Andrus believes is a shared “existential dread” of all indie devs. With faith in its work and encouraged by the response from beta testers and fans online, Omega Strikers could be one of the few online service games to shoot and score where others have failed. We're just going to have to wait until kick-off to find out.

Omega Strikers launches April 27 on mobile, PC, and consoles.