Supervive was one of the big breakout successes of Steam Next Fest, a mashup of hero shooter and battle royale that went toe-to-toe with League of Legends on Twitch while its demo was up. Considering Supervive is led by former Riot devs and had its demo live during LoL's biggest annual tournament, that's likely something the team is very pleased with. But while I personally enjoyed Supervive, and it held impressive chart positions throughout Next Fest, I can't shake a distinct feeling of déjà vu.
Supervive pits teams of heroes against each other in a squad-based battle royale format. Your characters drop into a floating archipelago, killing neutral monsters to level up and improve their gear. If you're knocked down, an ally can pick you up, but if your whole team falls it's back to the battle bus. That relatively standard battle royale setup is altered by a little MOBA and hero shooter DNA – characters are DPS threats, or tanks, or healers, with skills that reflect their role in battles, and those XP-granting creeps are also lifted straight from the worlds of LoL or Heroes of the Storm.
Let Battlerite commence
In 2016, Battlerite came knocking on the door of the MOBA juggernauts. It stripped out almost all of the traditional MOBA grievances, from slow farming stages in the early game to griefing teammates who give up when the going gets tough. It eventually drew an all-time peak audience of 44,000. That's barely a mark against Riot or Valve, but it seems to have been a financial success – Battlerite developer Stunlock is still trucking, and is now better known for vampiric survival game V Rising.
In between Battlerite and V Rising, however, came Battlerite Royale. Before Fortnite and Warzone ate whatever was left of the pie baked by PUBG, damn near everyone tried their hands at battle royale games. As swift pivots went, it was no Fortnite, but Battlerite Royale was a smart, slick adaptation of the most popular format in the world at that time. It also struggled to break out of a hugely crowded market, pulling in fewer than 10,000 concurrents in its lifetime.
So how does this relate to Supervive? Well, the Next Fest breakout is a hero-shooter/MOBA/battle royale hybrid that takes place on a floating archipelago, where you gather floor loot dropped from neutral minions. Those minions mark pretty much the only difference between the two games, and that's hardly a substantial change. I know it's early days – the recent demo will lead to an open beta, and presumably plenty more testing before release – but looking back at Battlerite Royale, I don't think Supervive is doing anything notably better than what Stunlock managed.
Clearly I can't get into a proper game to check anymore, but old gameplay videos reassure me of the confidence in character and world design present in Battlerite Royale; something I don't think Supervive has quite locked down yet. There was a whimsy to the former, almost slapstick in nature, that was the result of what it had had a chance to build through its previous game. Right now, Supervive is a little light on that kind of personality, and while there's plenty of time to find an answer to how those vibes should eventually manifest, it's something I'd really like to see the team invest in.
There's an obvious precedent for the Next Fest hype around Supervive to be well-placed, and to continue through the next stages of the game's development. The success or failure of any given title is far from a sure sign of the success or failure of whatever comes next. Fortnite was almost a Save the World-shaped failure, playing a cartoonish second-fiddle to PUBG for months before becoming the global phenomenon it evolved into. DOTA ruled the MOBA roost before League of Legends, and now it's Riot, not Valve, that's pushing multimedia expansions of its universe. Ultimately, it's just as hard to predict the next hit as it was to guess at the last. Games like Palworld might be made relatively cheaply but find an audience in the tens of millions, while Sony-backed shooter efforts like Concord can flop despite the huge budgets reportedly poured into them. Dozens of factors can coalesce to determine a game's eventual success, and Supervive deserves the wins that it's clearly set up for – I just hope this sense of déjà vu proves to be entirely misplaced.
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