Off The Grid is the name of the Cyberpunk Battle Royale which is due to be released next year. 150 players fight for survival on a tropical dystopian island.
How much story should be in your battle royale? Yes!
Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9 and Elysium, is responsible for the service game, which continuously tells its story. He joined developer Gunzilla Games to work on the online multiplayer.
“The approach is to build the story in such a way that players have the option to jump right into the battle royale game or dive into the story and story missions, almost like a campaign you would play to following a story,” Blomkamp tells Gamespot.
According to Blomkamp, Off The Grid lets you create your own character and join one of the three available factions. How exactly these fractions should look like remains a mystery.
These organizations fight over a space elevator located on an island. The elevator is important because it provides access to asteroid mining, which has immense financial potential.
Blomkamp thinks that “the idea of a larger story told from different points of view” is a significant pillar for the game.
Within this narrative you will be sent into Battle Royale matches again and again and can continue to support the goals of your faction there.
There are also missions where two factions face each other directly. “So players can choose to have missions where their faction goes directly against the other faction’s mission, and both are tied into the story on a much larger level,” Blomkamp said.
“And that’s in an environment where a real battle royale is taking place. So you’re fighting off attacks from two different directions, so to speak, and trying to fulfill the narrative commitments that you have if you’re interested.”
Players can help shape the ongoing story
Your actions bring you more story immediately, but can also influence events in the long term. For example, Blomkamp considered that the story might develop based on the player base. So the faction with the fewest players would be about inferior.
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to do – that’s an idea, like this concept of Battle Royale 2.0. Your actions over a long period of time have an impact on the story and the world and the environment,” Blomkamp continued.
Along with screenwriter Richard Morgan, Blomkamp wants to create an “incredibly deep narrative and sort of lore story of how this whole place came to be.”
“So on this island there’s corporate sabotage and espionage and stuff that leads to assassins being hired – that’s basically the actors that you embody – and through that you can see how this world of refugees and contractors and mercenaries and corporate elites creates a really interesting seething powder keg of conflict and layers upon layers of characters and stories to explore in different ways in the future.”
The director did not want to reveal the narrative means used by Blomkamp and the team. If everything goes well, we can find out for ourselves by 2023 at the latest.
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