‘Short’ is a dirty word in videogames. It’s a shame, because a lot of short games are also fantastic, and a lot of extremely long games become bloated, empty, and repetitive. It comes partly down to personal taste, but I’m sure a lot of people would rather play something that lasts eight hours, and is packed with ideas and imagination, than a 200-hour open-world sandbox with a loose, ambient story. The problem is that ‘short’ has become synonymous with ‘unfulfilling.’ When people hear the word ‘short’ it makes them feel like they’re not getting value for money, like the game is going to shortchange them somehow.
Live-service games, conceptually, are the antithesis of short games. They’re supposed to last forever, and that’s probably one reason they’ve become so popular. They represent, in terms of raw expenditure – that is, dollars spent versus hours of game – a good return on investment. But in the last few years ‘live service’ has become a red-flag term. It has connotations of predatory monetization. It signals to expect constant updates that balance away all the fun. If remakes are in vogue right now, it’s because people want the more contained, finite games that used to comprise the mainstream. Everyone’s sick of games that, by definition, don’t go anywhere.
Crowbar Collective’s background is in focused, tightly designed FPS games – perhaps the most focused and tightly designed of them all. After years in development, in 2020 the team released the finished version of Black Mesa, its complete, top-to-bottom remake of Valve’s superlative Half-Life. But not content with just rebuilding the 1998 shooter, Crowbar went one further, surpassing the House of Gaben by completely reinventing the dreaded Xen levels and making them actually good.
At first, Crowbar Collective was a team of volunteers. Thanks to the huge success of Black Mesa, it’s become a codified development studio with 16 full-time staff and a retinue of contractors. Its next project, however, might come as a surprise. If you asked anyone ‘what kind of game do you want to see next from the people that did Black Mesa?’ just a year ago, the majority would say something single-player, campaign-focused, and probably not that dissimilar to Half-Life. On the surface, Rogue Point is antithetical to Crowbar Collective’s burgeoning identity, the kind of game that plays against the studio’s strengths. It’s co-op. It’s a roguelite. It’s live service.
But if the struggles of Overwatch, Valorant, Call of Duty, and even the mighty Counter-Strike 2 suggest the appetite for forever shooters is fading, Crowbar Collective’s goal is to examine what went wrong and create something different. If Black Mesa took the flawed foundations of Xen and imagined a better, more enjoyable version of the alien world, Rogue Point is doing the same for the live-service FPS.
“‘Live service’ has become a bit of a dirty phrase over the years as it has been exploited and monetized to the nth degree,” Crowbar Collective studio head Adam Engels tells me. “We wanted to strip out all the less desirable parts of live [service]. We made the game peer-to-peer, so it’s not dependent on dedicated servers and can always be played now and in the future. Outside of maybe some supporter skins, we designed our cosmetic drops to be unlockable by playing the game, and while we have a lot of information we want to get to the player, we designed our menus to be as straightforward as possible.
“Obviously every game developer wants their game to be enjoyed and played for as long as possible, but we don’t want players to feel like they have to mainline the game to keep up. A primary goal for us is to release the core of the game, lower the barriers to entry with a low cost, intuitive controls, small file size, and quick load times, and make it easy for players to feel like the game justified the money and time they spent with it. Our game is 6.8 gigabytes installed on Steam. That may go up, but we want players to be able to circle back to our game for a casual get-together with friends, or to check out the latest challenging update.”
So, how does Rogue Point work? You can play solo or as part of a team of four. There’s no PvP – across four different locations, you begin by choosing your gear and loadout, and then drop into objectives-based missions against increasingly hard battalions of CPU-controlled enemies. There are 24 mission layouts, dozens of different guns and attachments, and levels will change on each separate playthrough. If you’re expecting certain enemy spawns based on your previous experiences, Rogue Point’s ‘Parametric Design System’ will shuffle your opponents and the difficulty on each run.
That’s the fundamental structure. Stylistically and tonally, Rogue Point draws inspiration from SWAT 4, the classic Rainbow Six series, Insurgency, and Left 4 Dead. Take a look at the gameplay and you can also detect more than a hint of FEAR, and its 2023 flame bearer Trepang2. In the sense that it will receive regular updates and is designed to be played and replayed, Rogue Point feels like a live-service FPS. But without the sweaty balancing of PvP, and given that it’s hosted peer-to-peer, Crowbar Collective’s shooter is also encouragingly different from some of its ostensible rivals. It’s a good shooter first, and an ongoing multiplayer game second.
“Some tactical shooters let you choose from all the gear at the start to build your role,” Engels says. “We wanted to limit what gear players were going to run based on the small amount of resources they start with, then build into their role by completing actions and missions. We knew we wanted to let players fail a campaign and run out of retries to add stakes and consequences to the game. It can be hard to fail a campaign at the last second, but the lows define the highs, and a fail state prevents players from banging their heads against one specific skill check.
“It can be hard to explain what we do differently without sounding like we think other shooters are doing it wrong. That is not at all how we feel. We wanted to try a different approach to mission structure, in addition to our hook of being an accessible shooter with some roguelite elements mixed in. We have a lot of options for supporting Rogue Point post-release, but the overarching goal with both design and marketing is to keep it simple and understandable to players.”
Before Rogue Point, Crowbar Collective also toyed with the idea of adding co-op to Black Mesa. The idea was to have a separate campaign, similar to the ATLAS and P-Body missions in Portal 2, built around the two-player experience. But reworking Xen and also the infamously long, variously criticized Surface Tension occupied so much of Crowbar Collective’s time that the multiplayer version of Black Mesa was left on the cutting room floor – Engels says that, especially during the early days of the Half-Life remake’s production, the team was “punching above its weight class.”
Rogue Point feels more targeted and focused. The team wants to concentrate on the core campaign and keep the entire experience accessible and easy to understand. If live-service games are typically endless and eventually become platforms where anything goes, from gimmick game modes to ridiculous skins, emotes, and weapon decals, Rogue Point is more contained. It’s meant to have a long lifetime, but that longevity doesn’t come at the cost of direction and cohesion. It may be a ‘forever’ game, but it’s not an ‘everything’ game.
“We have to prove Rogue Point to the players first and deliver the best game we can,” Engels concludes. “We can do this by focusing on our core pillars of a fun, intuitive co-op shooter that gives you a reason to come back. I think it is important for a game to have a logical conclusion to development, especially after the marathon that was Black Mesa. But we also learned that you can get a lot of positivity – and sales – just by keeping at a game that people like.”