Why Shrapnel is leaning into the “early” in Early Access

3.18.2024

By Giancarlo Valdes, Contributor

Shrapnel isn’t your typical Early Access multiplayer experience. The first-person extraction shooter has only one operator to choose from, a small selection of weapons, and a mostly unfinished map set in a futuristic Japanese city. There are missing textures on buildings and other surfaces, and basic geometric shapes acting as placeholders for future content. It’s very much a greybox environment, an early stage in the development process that the public rarely sees in a playable game like this.

But for the Seattle-based Neon Machine, that was the point: It wanted to get the community involved as early as possible and fine-tune both the map and Shrapnel’s extraction gameplay based on their feedback. The greybox layout allows the team to make major changes and iterate the map over time, a task that would’ve been more difficult (and far more expensive) had they released a polished map with all the bells and whistles of a full release.

However, that doesn’t make it any less scary for Neon Machine’s veteran developers—some of whom have worked on big franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, and BioShock. They’re used to the more traditional path, either not showing anything to the public until the game is done or demoing under tightly controlled conditions at a convention or trade show.

“The community is very much shaping the game, and I’ll be honest: It’s very scary to put something so broken and incomplete in players’ hands. We’re just not used to that at all,” says Neon Machine CEO Mark Long.

Despite their initial fears, the team knew that letting the public play Shrapnel in its pre-alpha state—at the moment, only players who purchase one of its Extraction Packs have access—was the right way to build their ambitious multiplayer game. Known as Shrapnel Training Exercises (STX), each of these online sessions last for three days at a time, enabling Neon Machine to take the game down and improve it for a few weeks before the next STX starts.

These tests aren’t just a matter of finding bugs, as Neon Machine already has a robust QA team for that purpose. The team believes that collecting feedback from players this early in the process will help them build the best possible version of Shrapnel before it launches as a free-to-play game in 2025.

“We do a community playtest every single Thursday here at the studio. And the reason we do that is to have at least one touch point with our community every single week and to let them see what updates are coming down the road,” says executive producer Dave Johnson.

“It’s also why we chose this STX model. We wanted to have the ability to put the game up, get some of that early feedback, and then take it down and react to that feedback. We’ve already seen it have big, positive effects on tuning, playstyles—pretty much everything across the board within the game.”
 

Swinging for the fence

Shrapnel is a full-circle moment for Long, who first came up with the name decades ago. He’s had the URL for Shrapnel.com since 1995, and it became an inside joke among his peers. Whenever he pitched an idea for a new game, the first thing people would say was, “Let me guess, is it called Shrapnel?”

In 2020, the publishing team Long led at HBO Interactive spun off to form Neon Machine. At first, he thought they’d work on licensed IP like Game of Thrones, but he decided to shift gears and finally push ahead with Shrapnel after consulting with an early stage Web3 game company. Long emerged from that experience believing that the blockchain gaming space was “a blue ocean of opportunity.”

Blockchain technology was a perfect fit for a game idea that Long had, one inspired by his children. He watched as they created their own worlds and learned to visually program in Minecraft, and then as they got older, they turned to more advanced creation tools in games like Roblox and Fortnite. But Long noticed there aren’t too many games that his kids (or any other budding game creators) can play that allow them to keep building on their skills after they become adults.

“I think players are ready for it. I think they’ve grown up learning how to [create content], and I think it’s almost ridiculous that no one’s really focused on this,” says Long. “So part of the idea was, could you give regular player-creators content tools that were at a professional level, like the ones we use [as developers]? And then the second part of the thesis was, ‘Wow, blockchain is this free database technology that provides seamless attribution and payment.’ If I wanted to do this without blockchain, it’d be insanely expensive and complicated.”

Neon Machine opted to make a sci-fi extraction shooter, looking to Escape from Tarkov and other genre giants for inspiration. Shrapnel is set in 2044, a few years after a massive asteroid collided with the Earth’s moon, causing it to develop Saturn-like rings that regularly pelt large parts of the planet with dangerous meteorites. This evacuated area is known as the Sacrifice Zone, and it’s where the game’s battles take place as mercenaries seek to get rich off collecting those moon fragments.

Even in this early stage of the game, it’s striking to see the meteors—glowing green rocks with long trails of smoke—falling from the skies during a match. Grabbing them grants you Sigma abilities, special powers that can help turn the tide of a battle. Currently, the only Sigma ability is the Sigma Wave, which lets you knock players away from you. You can also use it to cushion yourself from fall damage, or to launch yourself higher in the air.   

Shrapnel looks and plays a lot like a blockbuster military shooter, and in the STX build, you can’t really tell that it’s built on the blockchain. But eventually, Neon Machine will let players create unique skins for weapons and gear and mint them as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that they can sell or trade with one another, as well as custom maps. Long describes it as like having “a giant box of NFT” LEGO bricks. Shrapnel will also have its own cryptocurrency, SHRAP, that you can earn through the marketplace and use to promote player-made creations to the rest of the community, or even sponsor tournaments (and get a cut of the prize pool in the process).

However, you don’t have to be a Web3 expert to play Shrapnel—or even engage with the crypto side at all, if you don’t want to. Making a compelling FPS is the team’s main priority, because if the game isn’t fun to begin with, then none of the blockchain features will matter.

“Our job, frankly, is to just be as welcoming as we can for anybody who wants to partake in this, whether it’s a Web2 player or a Web3 player,” says Johnson, “And then slowly over time, help them to understand why it’s important that we’re doing the things we are [with digital item ownership].”
 

Building with the community

While the STX sessions contain a barebones version of Shrapnel—there’s only a free-for-all mode at the moment—it’s still pretty fun if you can look past the bugs and other foibles that come with a work-in-progress game. The gunplay feels good, and it’s thrilling and stressful trying to extract with your precious Sigma fragments without dying. At one point, I was so nervous about the amount of meteorites I collected that I ran head-first into the extraction zone as the timer counted down. Within seconds, a sniper perched on a nearby rooftop killed me, scattering my loot for anyone to pick up.

I also enjoyed simply exploring the STX Yomi map, which is a fascinating mishmash of elements that represent both the present and future of Shrapnel. In regards to the latter, there’s a small part of the map that the team calls “the beautiful corner,” an area of the city that shows players the high bar of detail and fidelity that Neon Machine is aiming for in future updates. There’s a huge crater in the middle of an intersection, crackling with green energy, and the whole area has a bit of a cyberpunk feel with the glowing Japanese billboards and partially destroyed buildings.

“We had two goals stepping into the very first STX. One is to give players a taste of what we mean when we say this is a AAA first-person shooter—and that is the intent of that beautiful corner, to let people run around and see it,” says Johnson.

“And when they’re in those other areas that aren’t quite as polished or anywhere near as finished, they’re mentally calling back to that beautiful corner and saying, ‘I understand where they’re taking this. I can’t wait for this area to look the same way.’ It’s also a way for us to hone in on our moment-to-moment gameplay.”

Neon Machine has already amassed a large community through social media accounts and through the official Shrapnel Discord server, which has more than 120,000 members. Only a small fraction of that number (around 3,000) are currently playing the game, but even those that aren’t participating still talk to the team and help vote on important design decisions.

“One thing I’ve noticed about the Web3 community is they’re deeply invested, at a different level than my [previous] experience in game development,” says Long. “I like to say, ‘You’re either a clown or a god to the player.’ There’s just nothing in between. And here, you have players that have a deep sense of ownership, like they’ve been here from the beginning, collecting characters and their gamertags. They have a different level of investment.”

The team also appreciates the highly specific feedback they’re able to get from this smaller pool of players via surveys and Discord chats. Johnson says they’re in “information-gathering mode” with the STX sessions, seeing what people hate or dislike and what they’re gravitating towards in the game, and then making changes based on those responses. That’ll help the team optimize Shrapnel as much as possible before they open Early Access to anyone who wants to play later this year—which, unlike the STX, will always stay online and include new operators and progression systems.

Neon Machine is also being careful about slowly rolling out the SHRAP tokens and the rest of the game’s blockchain economy. Once they’re all out there, there’s no way to take back or reset something like that because real money is involved.

“In game development, there’s a term—crawl, walk, run—that people use a lot. Even if it takes a little bit longer than we’re totally comfortable with, we still want to remain in that crawl phase to make sure that we get things right when it comes to rolling out these [features], especially when anything carries real-world value,” says Johnson.

Shrapnel is available now in Early Access (via Extraction Pack purchases) on the Epic Games Store.