Omega Strikers is a new online multiplayer experience that comes from the team at Odyssey Interactive, a studio founded by former Riot Games employees who worked on titles like League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. Omega Strikers aims to utilize the most standout elements from other successful online titles - like the frantic nature of Rocket League and beloved roster of Overwatch - to create a brand-new experience for players.
Omega Strikers is a free-to-play title that recently entered open beta, and currently has an 11 character roster, with more set to be added over time. Each round of gameplay is 3v3, with each team trying to score goals with an illuminated puck. Each of the game's Strikers comes with a set of four abilities to help with both goal scoring and fighting - the other gameplay mechanic at work during matches. As players try to score, they can also hit players with attacks, even knocking them out of the field of play momentarily, with each Striker bringing a different sort of style to the table. The game is designed with content creators in mind, with several special features for streamers including an event offering of 1% of the game's first season revenue to the top creator competitor.
Developers Dax Andrus and Richard Henkel - who founded Odyssey Interactive alongside other former Riot Games employees Eric Lawless and David Capurro - sat down with Screen Rant to discuss the unique features of Omega Strikers, the game's focus on creators, and the future of the title.
You guys both worked at Riot Games on League of Legends. What were some of your takeaways about what players want in a multiplayer experience that people might not expect or that might seem counterintuitive?
Richard Henkel: Oh, that is a fantastic question. I think it's probably not counterintuitive, but maintaining a multiplayer competitive game around the world is ridiculously complex. That's so obvious, but Riot was a Western-based studio and Reddit is a very popular platform for people to talk about the game. It's easy to get caught up in what can sometimes feel like an echo chamber of, "X, Y, or Z thing is super broken. Why aren't the devs fixing it?" Look at the other side of the world. Look at Southeast Asia, where people don't feel the same problems with the game. They actually are enjoying XYZ character or system or what have you. Regional differences are crazy.
Player intent, and what they're looking for in a multiplayer game, is so varied. When you get to the scale of League of Legends, you're not just catering to the hyper-competitive player. You're competing with the people who want to be able to chill when they get home from work and just play a game for fun, or people that may have to dip out in 30 minutes. "How do I just get my adrenaline rush before I have to leave?"
Dax Andrus: I think that is an awesome question, because the way that Richard and I actually met is very aligned to the thing that Richard was just saying. Player needs are so profoundly different, even within a given community for a given game, that sometimes you have to do something as crazy as creating TFT [Teamfight Tactics] inside of League of Legends. You create a different type of gameplay experience to actually meet everybody's needs.
That one's hard, because as a developer, it almost feels like sometimes you have to look into a crystal ball a little bit and be like, "What's the actual best mix of everything that I can create that makes players around the world happiest?" And sometimes that is doing something as crazy as making a whole new mode; a whole new way to play the game.
Richard Henkel: Here's an interesting thing that I remember happening after we had shipped TFT. As a game dev, it is very easy to get caught up in the numbers. It's like, "You shipped the thing. Well, how many people are playing it? Do they continue to play? Are they spending money?" Because that matters as a business. But after we had shipped TFT, and it was successful beyond what we ever could have hoped as a dev team, Tom Cadwell, the Vice President of Design at Riot, sent a message. "Hey, everyone. It is probably easy to get caught up in the numbers. But remember, in those numbers are lifelong memories that people are making; lifelong friendships that are being forged; dark days that you're helping people through."
It's not so much an answer to the question directly, but that's the thing that people turn to games for. It's for that. And building games that can provide those opportunities and those avenues is what makes game devs so satisfied. As a game dev, it can be easy to sometimes lose sight of them, because you're so focused on the problem right in front of your face that you forget about the impact that you're able to have on people around the world.
Yeah, it's really easy to get caught up in the stats.
Richard Henkel: Yeah. "Uh oh, people are really mad on Twitter!"
They're always gonna be mad about something, and same goes for Reddit. All of the different strikers in Omega Strikers are really unique and bridge the gap between adorable and intimidating - personally I'm a big fan of Era, the sarcastic goth girl. What were the most important elements you kept in mind when creating this starter roster?
Dax Andrus: When we develop characters, we have a few pillars that we really try and make sure every character hits. There's an idea that we want any player in the game to have a character that resonates with them. Not every character needs to have the broadest appeal; not every character needs for 100% of players to say, "Yeah, I'm into that one." But we want to try and meet the needs of anybody who plays the game. And we think that the way to do that is to focus on building characters that feel aspirational, and a lot of that comes from having a solid core emotional identity to the character themselves.
You've probably noticed that there are characters who are big, over-the-top intimidating; there are characters who are cute and shy, and there are characters who are everywhere in between. Building that aspirational quality to them, where you can see these emotions reflected very clearly, is an important component. We also wanted a lot of diversity in our roster to try and meet that goal. We wanted anybody, regardless of their backgrounds, to be able to look at the game and see something that resonates with them; see a character that they feel themselves reflected in at least a little. Whether that's in how the character looks, whether that's in how the character talks, whether that's in the character's attitude—that should be there.
We wanted that core diversity mixed with aspirational elements for each of the characters to deliver that feeling. Hopefully, what that gives you is something that feels like a version of people or characters that you know in real life, but pushed over the top. They feel relatable, but still exciting to play.
Richard Henkel: That process was a really long, collaborative thing between Dax and Kelly, the artist that helped us lay the foundations for the game. They noodled on, character by character, the references in terms of look and attitude and voice actors. Then it's trying to take everything and turn it into a lineup of character concepts, and then they continued to refine from there. That was probably the majority of 2020 and 2021; you guys just noodling on the original roster of characters. Turns out it's hard.
Dax Andrus: One thing that might not be unique to us, but it's a thing that we found to be super helpful, was that we'd play the character a lot in game before locking in all that much about their identity or who they are. And we kind of see what it feels like to play the character. As you're playing that character, you're like, "What emotions am I feeling? How do I think this character would hold themselves?" And then we'd refer back to all those feelings that we had playing the prototype, gray box versions of the characters.
For the character that's going and beating people up real close range, like a brawler? That feels like an over-the-top character, and there's a way to not just make him sinister and mean and someone that won't appeal broadly. But we give people that over-the-top bragging moment, when they go have those crazy KO plays.
Omega Strikers is launching with an immediate focus on content creators, and integrating them into the game, which I don't think I've really ever seen in a game launch—especially with the 1% revenue incentive. Did you always know you wanted to like the game so closely with creators?
Dax Andrus: Yeah, definitely. I think, from the beginning, that's been the core focus of our studio. We think that, for the next generation of gamers, the content creator ecosystem is incredibly important. That's almost the core of game discovery, it's a core of a lot of the relationships that are built around games. At Riot, we got a lot of unique opportunities to build those relationships with content creators, particularly for TFT. And we saw how those relationships blossomed into actually making a better game. The feedback that they had; the way that they thought about things was another unique perspective to take in that ultimately made it so the game that we made resonated with more players.
From the beginning, we've had a focus on trying to develop the game with content creators in mind. We're making sure that it's an experience that both feels good for them to play, but also feels like there's unique opportunities for their viewers to interact and engage with them in ways that they might not get in other games. Because at the end of the day, the content creator ecosystem is really a loop of relationship between content creator creating something and players viewing something. They talk about it, they have those interactions, and it creates all these unique scenarios that pop up. If we can create some of those that people haven't seen before with our game, I think we'll be in an awesome spot.
Richard Henkel: It's not just about the game, it's about the ecosystem that surrounds it. At Riot, it's not just about League, it's about eSports, it's about the content creators, and it's about so many different parts. We didn't leave Riot with an idea in our heads of the type of game we wanted to make, but we had an idea of the principles that we wanted to use to make games. And one of them was just about being close to the community, which is inclusive of content creators. It's inclusive of your average gamer like me when I was 15 years old, and it's being able to launch alongside them and offer things that feel mutually beneficial.
With the 1% revenue thing, we were just like, "What is something that we can give that other people might not?" Well, 1% revenue can be pretty insane. Because we're talking about the entire game here, and if things go well, that could be absolutely incredible for someone. That'd be fun. So, we're just doing things that we think other people might not have done before. We'lll just try and see what we can do to make being in a partnership with us kind of fun, as well.
It makes it a lot more communal. You can watch your favorite creator, or you can compile highlight reels to connect to their content. This is a really direct line, which I think is really cool.
Richard Henkel: In a lot of games, if you go to someone's profile, there'll usually be a Twitch link that they'll just paste in. You have to copy it, and then go to your browser to paste it in. And we were like, "What if we just remove that? If you go to the leaderboard and see people at the top, they have a Twitch link to go go straight to their channel." How can we as the game dev studio help drive traffic to the creators that are helping play and support the game? We make it easy for them to be able to build and grow, because eyeballs and players watching them is so important. Let's help and support that, which begins a serendipitous cycle.
You've received some feedback already, because people are playing this closed beta. But as the game starts opening up to a wider audience, are there any elements of Omega Strikers that you're especially excited for players to experience?
Richard Henkel: Great question, first of all. I think it's not so much a feature of the game that I'm excited to see, but rather the development of strategies that no one has yet seen. We've done a lot of testing with a really small, concentrated groups of players, but it's always been for a very short burst. As the game is changing, they're still trying to adapt all the changes.
But when we launch, what we're excited to see is how players actually formulate plans. You see this in Rocket League, and the almost unlimited depth it has. You see people pulling off stuff today that would have been absolutely impossible two years ago. I'm just excited to have the community show the actual potential and depth and outplays that we haven't even heard of yet.
We saw that a little bit at the end of the big beta in August, where there was a very specific group of characters, and players used their abilities in a very specific way—including Era, the sarcastic goth girl. It was just a really interesting strategy. Now, what's the counter? What do people have to develop to go against that? That's when multiplayer games get fun and exciting. That's what I'm excited about.
Dax Andrus: To elaborate on that a little bit, as developers, we've been playing the game for hundreds of hours. But I think we are fully aware of the fact that a week after this game comes out, the best players in the game are going to be far, far better. And that's always one of those really exciting things to see: creating something, and then watching the players push the limits of lwhat can actually be done in the game.
We've seen it in some of these play tests that we've run, where you give the players the game for a few days, and all of a sudden, crazy new things are developing. New ways to play characters; the skill ceiling and their mechanics are going through the roof. I think that we're really hopeful that what we've built has the potential for people to play for hundreds of hours, and still be pushing the limits on skill and where they can take the gameplay.
I'm also really excited to see what the reaction to the character roster that we built is. Because we put a lot of our time and creative energy into trying to make something there that felt new and exciting. It feels like an IP that we could continue building into the future, because we want to take it to multiple games, and we want to potentially explore things in the future—fingers crossed all goes well—with other mediums. A lot of that just comes back to: are our characters resonant? Do people play the game and feel like there's something that reflects themselves back?
I'm hopeful on both of those, but those would be the two ones that I would be looking out for primarily.
Richard Henkel: As a studio, we're really excited to see if the community ends up having a hunger or desire for actual competitive play. We're not about to go and build DLCs; we're a small indie studio, and that is a massive endeavor. But if it ends up that the community wants it, we want to find ways to support and grow more of that grassroots competitive scene that you see in games like Smash. Our mission is to ignite a competitive spirit, and if that hunger ends up being there, it's great. That is one of the other ways to fuel and have that target for players to be like, "If I invest my time and get good, I'll be there someday."
Just to wrap up, I always like to ask, is there anything else you want players to know about Omega Strikers?
Richard Henkel: It's just the beginning. [Laughs] That's the cheesiest line.
Dax Andrus: I would riff off of what Richard just said there. This is a game that we want to be building alongside our players for hopefully years to come. That's the experience that we had at Riot, building League of Legends and TFT alongside players for the better part of a decade. And that's something that we aspire to here, so we're hopeful that this is a game that people love.
I'm sure there will be things that they'll point out we could be doing better. We'd love to invest in those and basically grow the game alongside them over time.
Omega Strikers is now available in open beta for PC via Steam, and is set to release for mobile devices later this year and all major consoles in 2023.