u/eddietree

our team recently made the difficult decision to stop developing the battle royale mode in our game Scramble Knights after almost 3 years of work.

we had over 26k+ players on steam join our playtests and currently sitting on 30k WL. feedback was strong, and for a long time we genuinely believed we could make it work (smoking dank hopium)

years ago when we started, the dream was simple: build a massive online zelda-inspired BR world. imagine a huge hyrule with 64 links running around trying to save the princess. we wanted to reach for the stars.

but after four playtests and lots of discussion with the team and community, we just weren't comfortable with having to build our entire future around sustaining a massively high CCU as a live service

at the same time, we realized the things ppl were most excited about weren't actually the battle royale game mode. it was the exploration, progression, dungeons, loot, social spaces, worldbuilding, and adventuring together with friends. so we're pivoting scramble knights into a shared online adventure rpg.

the good news is that almost none of the work is being thrown away. the combat, enemies, progression systems, networking, content, and world all carry forward. we're not totally yeeting 3 years of dev, we are just changing how people interact with this world

we made a deep dive video here (reasoning + our journey here):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fio4dK0DDvs

Steam post:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2379350/view/708899110030148099

curious if anyone here has had to majorly pivot their game last minute? would be interested to hear how other studios handled this

- Eddie