A playtest starts today with access coming via Twitch drops.
2K Games has finally joined its competitors: It has a hero shooter. (Aside from the defunct Battleborn, that is.) The company flew a few dozen streamers (and me and a couple other press) to LA this week to unveil Project Ethos, an upcoming free-to-play competitive game that it’s calling a “roguelike hero shooter.”
It’s not really a roguelike: You just get to pick from randomized sets of buffs throughout a match. Otherwise, it’s a third-person shooter that resembles Fortnite, but with hero characters who come with unique guns and abilities, and a low-stakes PvPvE extraction mode as its main attraction.
The last surprise new hero shooter I previewed was Concord, and although I thought it was alright, things didn’t go great for that one (there are rumblings of a comeback attempt). But unlike Concord, which was announced just a couple months before it went on sale for $40 and immediately tanked, Project Ethos is still in “early” development, according to reps from developer 31st Union, and will be free-to-play. A public playtest is starting today, with access granted via Twitch drops from streamers at the event, and there was lots of talk about listening to player feedback during development.
There’s a good amount here for a game in “early” development (which actually started five years ago with a small team), and I spent several hours playing it yesterday. My favorite of the six available characters was Prism, who can peer through a ring of light that marks enemies and buffs her sniper shots, as well as briefly cloak.
