Prototype 40-player Smash battle royale gets playtest

The battle royale genre has seemingly been taken over by extraction games as of late, with the likes of Escape from Tarkov paving the way for a more hardcore experience many are loving.

However, there is still room for new iterations of the battle royale formula and with Byte Breakers from Odyssey Interactive, this is certainly the case.

Byte Breakers in its simplest form is a Smash Bros. battle royale, pitting 40 players against each other as they fight it out to knock every last enemy off the stage.

But, it’s not just a Smash clone. Instead, it is being described as “an evolution on the genre that Smash started”, allowing players to “have wild experiences they’d never find in a straight-up platform fighter.”

In the announcement video, Odyssey Interactive stated that it is in the very early stages of creating this experience and it may not even be released as a fully-fledged game.

Instead, the developers are using a playtest to see if it garners enough interest from those who get in, giving the necessary feedback as to whether the game is “fun and unique.”

If the feedback is negative or players are simply not having fun, the studio may “just go next”, scrapping the project entirely in favor of other ideas that are cooking.

You can request a key for yourself by heading to the official Steam Store page and when the playtest launches, you’ll have to be one of “thousands” chosen to get involved before any more design decisions are made.

While this may seem like a backwards way compared to the go-to game development process, Odyssey Interactive “learned first hand” that with its earlier game, Omega Strikers, “the risks of keeping things under wraps for too long”.

With Byte Breakers, and future projects, the company wants to hear what the community thinks “much, much earlier” in an effort to craft a better game overall.

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