Upcoming Supervive game has Korean character inspired by Faker

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Upcoming Supervive game has Korean character inspired by Faker

Published: 20 Nov. 2024, 18:20 Updated: 21 Nov. 2024, 10:28

CHO YONG-JUN
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A screenshot from Nexon and Theorycraft Games' upcoming MOBA battle royale game Supervive [NEXON]

All eyes in the gaming community are currently on Supervive, and with good reason — the MOBA-style battle royale is the first-ever project to come from Theorycraft Games, the nascent U.S. studio run by the legendary development team behind League of Legends, and it debuted at Steam's Next Fest last month to overwhelming success. The Riot Games classic's influence is clear in both the gameplay and its roster — which even includes a character inspired by five-time world champion Faker.

Jin, described as a "dangerous blink assassin," was not playable during closed beta testing but is one of the 16 hunters that will be available in the game's open beta, which begins in Korea on Thursday. The character is Korean, and developers said they are working on "culturally resident" skins.

Supervive booth at the G-Star gaming convention in Busan on Thursday. [CHO YONG-JUN]

“[Faker] is kind of this flashy playmaker, and I think that’s why he’s iconic in so many ways," Supervive Executive Producer Jessica Nam, formerly executive producer of League of Legends, said in an interview Friday during G-Star 2024 at the Bexco convention center in Busan. "He has that mechanical gift, and I wanted to [have] a flashy playmaking hunter."

Faker, the renowned mid-laner of esports organization T1, is known for his aggressive gameplay and his ability to oversee an entire match while making optimal decisions for his team — skills that a good "assassin" hunter should need.

Theorycraft Games Producer Jessica Nam, left, and Theorycraft Games CEO Joe Tung during an interview held Nov. 15 at the G-Star gaming festival in Busan. [NEXON]

Supervive had high expectations from the start, with its team led by Joe Tung, the former Riot Games Executive Vice President who spearheaded the development of League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, and other developers involved in the production of titles including Halo, Overwatch, Dota 2 and Valorant. Drawing from that constellation of expertise, the game is pitched as a cross between top-down MOBAs like League of Legends and battle royale titles like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.

A game throws together 40 players — consisting of multiple teams in duo and four-player squads, rather than the five-versus-five formula seen in other MOBAs — into a top-down last-team-standing battle. This makes the gameplay more fast-paced and, importantly, delivers more opportunities for individual players to “carry” their squad through a single match — as Faker has been known to do.

“From a combat perspective, you want to feel like you are making an impact, that you are kind of solo-carrying your own game," Nam said. "With some of these competitive games, it can be a little hard to feel that."

Theorycraft Games CEO Joe Tung and Games Producer Jessica Nam at the Supervive booth during the G-Star gaming festival in Busan on Friday [NEXON]

The Spike — an instant-kill skill that involves hitting an enemy that is gliding in between in-game islands, familiar to those who have played Super Smash Bros. — maximizes the potential catharsis of solo-carrying one's team. Nam, who admitted that Nintendo's flagship titles had inspired the mechanic, described it as a way of rewarding a Faker-esque high-risk, high-reward playstyle. “We wanted to make the action flashy,” Nam said.

That doesn't mean Supervive intends to tire you out; its developers also aimed to make sessions quite short. The goal was to spare gamers from “going for a long time without any kind of resolution” and for more game-to-game variance.

“We hope [Supervive] goes on for years and years and years and years,” Tung said. “We hope to build the game, with our players, over a long period of time and continue to iterate on it and improve it, hopefully, forever.”