Development studio Odyssey Interactive has announced that it is working on a prototype combining Smash Bros-style platform fighting with 40-player battle royale gameplay. What's more, it is releasing this prototype to the public (thanks, Eurogamer).
Byte Breakers, as the dev is currently calling it, initially looks a lot like Smash when it first appears in the above reveal trailer. But, as the screen gets bigger, you'll see that this is a fair amount larger than anything we've seen in Nintendo's beloved fighting series to date. Forget a brawl, this is an all-out battle.
Now, the team is very open to the fact that this game may not end up getting made (what we're seeing is a prototype, after all), but it is opening the early build to those interested on Steam this Friday to get feedback and see whether the concept sticks.
"We hope you can see the potential," the developer notes in the recently released video, "parts of it will feel familiar, but we hope as a whole, it's a new experience".
As with any platform fighter, the Smash Bros. comparisons are pretty clear from the jump, but the studio believes this is something to be excited about: "We're not trying to make a better Smash, we're trying to build an evolution of the genre that Smash started way back when we were kids".
It's a commendable mission that we'd be interested to see in action when the public playtest kicks off later this week. Smash has held onto the genre for so long, you can't help but wonder what it'd take to innovate it at this point. The public playtesting is a bold move, yes, but as the studio says, "we'd rather try something crazy and fail than just make a game that you feel that you've already played".
The playtest will be open to "a few thousand" people who request access on the Byte Breakers Steam page. Who knows, maybe we'll even see the Smash-inspired brawler make it to a Nintendo console one day.
Odyssey Interactive is the team that brought the free-to-play "footbrawler" Omega Strikers to Switch last year. The dev ended work on that one just a few months after launch, stating that it had to move on to new projects to keep the studio afloat.