2K has announced Project Ethos, a new “3rd-person roguelike hero shooter” – yep, here’s another one of those – from 31st Union, the studio headed up by Michael Condrey, the co-founder of Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games that didn’t do The Callisto Protocol.
If you need a quick refresher, before forming 31st Union in February 2019, Condrey worked on a string of CoD titles that proved to be hits at Sledgehammer, so he’s bringing plenty of shooter pedigree to this project.
If you look through the screenshots and footage, because it’s, you know, a hero shooter, I very much cannot promise you that you won’t have Overwatch’s Tracer saying ‘Cavalry’s ‘ere’ going through your brain on repeat, or end up thinking about the whole Concord saga, as is sadly the state of play for any game of this genre that looks like this coming out in 2024. Here’s the thing though, just because one game had a tough time, doesn’t neccesarily mean another will.
The game, which will be free-to-play right off the bat, so there’s a difference between it and Concord, is still being touted as just a thing that’s “in development”, so it doesn’t seem like its arrival is too imminent, although there is a community playtest taking place over the next few days, from October 17 to October 20. Details of that can be found here.
Project Ethos has an extraction mode called Trials that sounds like it’s along the lines you’d expect for such a thing – stay longer, and you incur risk but a chance at better rewards. The roguelike element of it comes via randomised upgrade choices, which can change up your character’s attacks and abilities and are earned during matches. I assume you earn them by shooting people good.
We’ll have to see what Project Ethos evolves into and whether it can escape the bad vibes an Overwatch-like hero shooter surfacing in the year 2024 cast. Here’s hoping it’s popular enough to be a thing people aren’t jokingly trying to meme back onto the market post-launch.