When Splitgate first launched as an early access and free-to-play game on Steam in 2019, it left a mark on the arena shooter genre. It caught the attention of first-person shooter🔜 fans and newcomers alike who all wanted to see what was interesting about the game that mixed Halo’s combat with Portal’s titular mechanic. Studio 1047 Games, founded and originally run by only two people, Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian, quickly began growing its team to prepare for the game’s launch and its later expansion onto other platforms.

Two years later, Splitgate released in a beta form, and its success seemed clear. Suddenly, more than half a million players were looking for the best places to place their portals and surprise their enemies. With over 600,000 downloads and peaks of 100,000 users on PC and consoles, the game started to grow a strong following ওthat loved its movement and frenetic gameplay. However, its servers couldn’t hold the amount of players trying to ♚log in, and this led to hour-long queues that created several issues. Splitgate received support from 1047 Games until late 2022, when the team decided to fully focus on the obvious next step: Splitgate 2.

“We're no longer resource constrained,” explains game director Ian Proulx in our interview at Gamescom. “We started from around 15 [people]. Now [we have] 175 on the team and it’s still growing.” He goes on to say that this increase in the number is reflected in the amount of content the team can add to the sequel and the overall quality of the game.

Proulx shows me a trailer with two groups of pro players trying an alpha version. The first big change impressed me instantly: it’s being developed in Unreal Engine 5 and it shows, with the overall quality in textures and the sharp resolution in every character model and object made clear in the footage✅. But most importantly, it feels like Splitgate 2 has something that the original lacked: a cohesive art style and a personality. The use of blue, red, purple, and white as its bold main colors make it striking to look at, and Proulx mentions that they have a specific vision this time.

“Splitgate 2 really is our own thing,” he says. “You'll see [it] just looking at this graphic [he points at the game’s official poster], for example. Lots of inspiration from Formula 1, we’ve got a lot of F1 fans on the team. [Also] from sports like NBA and NFL. I'm a huge sports guy. We wanted to create a very sporty, ‘positive future’, we like to say. Really leaning into that kind of sports angle to create something unique.”

‘Factions’ is another new key element that will change how Splitgate 2 is played. This is the class system of the game, and you’ll be able to play with one of three different factions: one focused on mobility that gains speed buffs, a support class that can heal ꦿyour teammates and spot enemies, and the third one, the tank of the team, the slowest class but with the ability to deploy small shields and throw sticky grenades.

Proulx sounds very proud of this class system, and it cert🌞ainly feels like it’s Splitgate’s next natural step, adding more variety and options for different strategies than the original game. However, as someone who played Splitgate back in the day, I was curious to know more about how the team was conceiving the sequel with new playeꦡrs in mind. The original was very easy to pick up and start playing, but it also quickly became overwhelming for casual players who couldn’t get into the portals mechanic.

“I think we've made portals a lot more accessible with some of the features we've done to just make it simpler,” explains Proulx. “It's one button now. We now have a smart portal system [which] knows which type of portal you're trying to spawn instead of having to go back and forth. You can, of course, go back and use the traditional left and right portals separately if you want to. But we wanted to make that a little easier to use so you can focus on making sick plays instead of trying to remember which button to press.”

Proulx also explains that the design of the new maps was conceived with both hardcore and casual play𝓡ers in mind, creating levels that &ldquℱo;are a little bit closer and a bit less dependent on the portals”. It seems that you’ll be able to play your first matches in a more conventional way, just focusing on learning the game’s feeling and movement, and leaving the portal tricks for later.

If this sounds like Splitgate 2 could lose what makes it unique, Proulx asks fans not to worry about it. “We've maintained a very high skill ceiling, if not higher, for the top players,” he says. “I feel like we've really hit that [curve]: easy to learn, difficult to master. I think Fortnite is a good example of a game that does that well, where obviously the top Fortnite players are building like crazy, but the casual Fortnite player can still have fun.

“That's the goal with Splitgate 2, which I don't think we hit in Splitgate 1. I think it was too difficult for the casuals who didn't portal to even get into the game. So I think we've been able to kind of maintain that very high skill ceiling for the advanced players who want to portal, but make it a little bit easier [for the casuals].”

Splitgate 2 is going to be free-to-play again, so I ask Proulx how he feels about this scenario and what the long-term plans for the game are. Unfortunately, he can’t tell me any specifics yet, but he assures that “this is the number one thing we've been thinking about: how we make sure that, this second time around, we have a great live ops plan with lots of content to keep things fresh, ongoing forever.”

However, Proulx feels confident when he thinks about the uniqueness of Splitgate 2. “It boils down to gunplay and portals,” he says. “There's not a lot of shooters out there that kind of have that classic style of gunplay where you're shooting from the hip like a Halo.”

He dives deeper into the game’s gameplay elements when he mentions ‘Hot Zone’, Splitgate 2’s twist on the classic King of the Hill mode. “It is quite a bit different. It's round-based. There's a little bit of logic to where the hill spawns, so it’s not the same order every single time.

“One of our key goals with this game was meaningful variety for the purpose. So even within a game mode, we want to have variet🌞y: if I play Ho𝔍t Zone on a certain map, the next time I play it, it [will be] a little bit different.”

Also, inspired by Apex Legends and Titanfall, Proulx mentions a sliding mechanic that he’s sure will drastically change Splitgate 2’s🥀 movement.

“A big thing that we saw requests for all the time in Splitgate was adding sliding,” he explains. “That's something we really spent a lot of time on“We took bits and pieces [of other sliding mechanics] and kind of added our own flair to it. I think our sliding really [rocks], I think the community is going to love it. The feedback we've seen from the very small number of people who've played so far has been outstanding.“

With an open release 🥂for 2025, It’s too soon to know how Splitgate 2 will do in the competitive landscape, with in an industry that hasn&rs♏quo;t shown any mercy for most of the new live-service titles being released over the last few years. However, Proulx and the Splitgate 2 team seem to be doing everything in their power to catch lightning in a bottle for the second time in a row.