Housemarque properly unveils Stormdivers and it is definitely battle royale
What's Nex.
Finnish arcade game specialist Housemarque (Nex Machina, Resogun, Super Stardust) has properly thrown the sheet off new PC game Stormdivers, having revealed the name and multiplayer intentions earlier in the year.
We now know for certain Stormdivers will be a battle royale game - a third-person science-fiction battle royale game, although today's announcement doesn't say for how many players. We know it will have character classes with different abilities, will have vehicles, and will have player-versus-environment cooperative content as well as player-versus-player battles.
Exactly which classes, abilities and PvE missions the game will have wasn't detailed, but we can see glimpses in today's new trailer. We can see what appears to be stealth as well as huge boosted jumps, dashes and deployable wall-like shields. There doesn't appear to be crafting, but the announcement mentions "exotic" loot so that element of the typical battle royale experience will be in, as will a storm, albeit a recurring storm of some kind. It sounds as though Stormdivers will entice you to dive in and out of the storm for the greatest rewards, hence the name, I suppose.
There's still no publisher attached publicly to the project but there is a broad 2019 release date.
Stormdivers represents a change of tack for Housemarque after the studio proclaimed the arcade genre dead late last year. Sales of Nex Machina were "lacklustre" despite its brilliance so the studio needed to adapt in order to survive. Stormdivers isn't a rushed saving throw but a project in development for two years already, and it isn't the only game Housemarque is working on; there's a bigger, triple-A game bubbling away, although what it will be I have no idea.