The entire premise of the Early Access system on Steam is to allow developers to get their games into the hands of gamers more quickly. When a game publishes onto Steam in an Early Access state, players understand that it’s far from finished and that updates will be issued on a consistent and recurring basis. What you don’t often see though, is a game that issues an update that fundamentally rewrites itself into a completely new game in a totally different genre.
In its first incarnation, XLR was a tower defense style game, similar to Cosmic Trip in a lot of ways. You set up turrets and other gear to defend against an onslaught of AI enemies. Here is some footage showing the original game in action:
Now, a few months after it released onto Steam, it’s undergone a major update. On July 19th, the v.0.4.0.0 update not only added a litany of new items, character classes, and other features, but it also shifted the entire game to instead be a multiplayer arena shooter.
“We made the decision after experimenting with player-vs-player combat back in May,” said Daniel Isenhower of Metaware Limited, LLC, the developers of XLR. “We already had multiplayer, but it was all coop, and consisted of shooting enemies and setting up turrets together. We wanted to see how it would feel if we had PvP combat, so we added the ability to shoot each other in a test build.”
But it just didn’t feel right in the previous version of the game. The movement mechanics, the options for weapons, and the map designs weren’t really tuned to optimize competitive multiplayer. So they had to either abandon the concept, or shift the game to allow for it. They chose the latter, which you can see in action below:
Clearly, it’s now an entirely different experience. “We didn’t want to give up on PvP yet, so we threw together a quick map with hallways and rooms, and it was instantly ten times more fun,” said Isenhower. “Teleportation was still a problem though, and so we spent a bunch of time experimenting with locomotion, and ended up with a sliding movement mechanic that we think significantly reduces or even eliminates motion sickness for many players. None of our testers (including people experienced with VR and people brand new to VR) have experienced any nausea. Once we had that, we knew we were on to something, and decided to go all in on switching the focus of the game.”
This latest update does more than just shift the genre though, as it adds a ton of new content as well. They now have 9 different player classes which adds a great deal of diversity to the experience. So much diversity in fact, in just a few short months, they’ve adapted their old game to be a more robust and feature-packed arena shooter than most of their competition in this new genre have been able to do since launch.
Although it’s worth pointing out that jumping into the contested competitive shooter market brings on heavy competition with the likes of Hover Junkers and Battle Dome already established, as opposed to the much thinner tower defense market.
And as a matter of fact, in the wake of shifting focus and adding a downpour of new content and features, they didn’t hike the price like other developers have done during the Early Access phase. Instead, they actually slashed it significantly (from $18.99 to $4.99,) opening the floodgates to even more new players hopefully trying the game out.
“We’ve always been very nimble as far as development goes, so in some ways, shifting focus came very naturally for us,” said Isenhower. “But I’ll be honest: it wasn’t always easy to look at the huge swaths of code I had poured so much time and thought into, and just rip them out of the game. We’re convinced it was the right decision though, and overall it’s been very exciting to see XLR morph into an arena shooter.”
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You can download XLR on Steam right now for $4.99. The HTC Vive, with motion tracked controllers, is the only officially supported HMD at this time. This Reddit thread includes a lot of additional information from the developer.
