Season One Of Splitgate: Arena Warfare Begins Today
The mechanics of Valve’s Portal games were pretty cool. Wouldn’t it be equally as cool if you could use portals in the same fashion in other games? Good thing portals themselves are a public domain concept. 1047 Games has created Splitgate, a multiplayer first-person shooter where everyone has the power to create portals and move about the arena.
And now there’s a lot more to Splitgate than just that. 1047 has launched the game’s first season, introducing a ton of new content and features:
- A new close-quarters map called Abyss set in an ancient temple and featuring a futuristic new melee weapon similar to Halo 2’s energy sword.
- A new Race mode where players compete to collect disco balls as fast as possible using portals on each map for bragging rights on the leaderboard.
- New daily and weekly challenges that award experience points.
- A fresh in-depth tutorial to better teach new players Splitgate’s major mechanics.
- Significant performance, graphics and lighting improvements. Every level has also been revamped with a “living map” design, featuring new details that tell a different story each season (e.g., the underwater Atlantis map now sports leaking cracks in its glasswork).
- Improved anti-cheat system.
- Improved competitive play with redesigned ranking and matchmaking based on the Elo-style rating system found in games like Overwatch. Players will be assigned a specific skill rating after 10 placement rounds that will help put them in games against players of appropriate aptitude.
- The highly requested implementation of crosshair selection.
- Smarter AI that behaves more dynamically like humans, jumping around the map, sprinting to avoid gunfire, and maneuvering more intelligently to find targets.
- A more user-friendly HUD and UI, including a redesigned main menu with an original track from Grammy Award-winning composer Christopher Tin in collaboration with DJ tyDi.
- NVIDIA Highlights integration, letting GeForce users automatically capture their best multi-kills and headshots in game.
If all that’s not enough for you, there’s the Splitgate Season 1 Arena Pass, which adds a new progression system to unlock exclusive skins, characters, emotes, emblems and more. The game is free to download, but it makes its money off the pass — it costs $8.99.
Splitgate: Arena Warfare is available now on Steam.