Catalyst Black is finally here! Claim founder status, and sign up for a chance to be one of the very first to play the game. More information and details at catalystblack.com and discord.gg/catalystblack.
Catalyst Black - Early Access Trailer
Catalyst Black is a team based, drop-in drop-out, battleground shooter unlike anything else on the market. Each player has access to an array of fantastic weapons and abilities. Players can also draw on the powers of ancient masks, allowing them to transform into primal gods from another realm. Catalyst Black takes place in a world of mystery and magic where players get to play across a variety of maps and game modes while collecting, upgrading and customizing an array of weapons and gear.
With Catalyst Black, we wanted to take all our lessons from building Vainglory and create something fresh both creatively and technically. Our vision has been to create a combat experience that feels refined and that is both approachable and deep. Even now, in 2020, we don’t feel gaming experiences like this exist in the mobile space.
Catalyst Black will release first across mobile platforms, but you can play with physical controllers from day one, and it is built from the ground up to be cross-platform ready. As we expressed in our cloud first vision, we want everyone to be able to play and have fun together regardless of platform or player control choice (touch, controller, or mouse and keyboard).
No waiting – drop-in and play!
One of the features of Catalyst Black we are most excited about is its unique drop-in, drop-out (“DIDO”) design. DIDO lets you drop directly into a friend’s game and play together by just tapping on their name. Solo players can also join matches in progress – there is never the need to wait to join a party or for long match-making times. And when life gets in the way, you can leave a match in progress without any penalty. We love the idea of immediate togetherness in our game experiences, and to be able to play anywhere, any time – something we feel represents forward-looking multiplayer design.
Choose The Perfect Loadout From 1,000s Of Gear Combinations
Your playstyle in Catalyst Black’s is defined by the various weapons and abilities you choose. Players get to collect, upgrade and customize their gear to create the perfect loadout for their playstyle. Hunt opponents as a long-range sniper, focus on objectives as a short range assassin or support your team as a tanky healer – the choice is yours.
We want the loadout system in Catalyst Black to provide players with a lot of depth of choice, as well as to give our more analytical players an opportunity to nerd out on loadouts and builds and to constantly be looking for hidden combinations. Read Cloaken’s introduction to the progression system in Catalyst Black for more detail.
Mobile Combat Evolved
Catalyst Black is designed to feel like a refined battleground shooter that lets you show off your mechanical skill and tactical decision making in large scale battles. It features teams of 10+ and game modes that mix team combat with strategic objectives such as capturing the enemy flag or taking down specific neutral monsters.
A unique twist in Catalyst Black, is your ability to transform. In addition to your weapons and human abilities, you can also equip a mask that lets you temporarily transform into a powerful primal god. We love the “supers” and “ultimates” in games that we admire, and wanted to create our unique flavor of incredible power spike moments while offering viable tactical and strategic counterplay.
Built on the E.V.I.L. engine
We at Super Evil Megacorp believe that owning our engine lets us build truly unique player experiences that push the boundaries of the industry. Knowing what the code does all the way down to the bare metal means we can build a company culture that does not take “no” for an answer, and establishes our own rules. Our engine is what enabled us to showcase Vainglory’s MOBA gameplay on the Metal API on an iPhone 6 on stage with Apple in 2014 with hundreds of actors, thousands of dust particles, butterflies and incredible graphics all while running at 60 FPS.
With Catalyst Black, we have taken this technology to the next level; We have introduced a whole new environment authoring system and technologies that let us create beautiful, performant maps much faster. We have moved from pre-baked environment lighting to dynamic lighting to allow for more variety and flexibility while reducing our file sizes. We have also upgraded our animation system substantially to allow partial animations for strafing, transformations and much more. The result is a unique graphical look, hyper responsive and tactile gunplay on the broadest set of devices.
As a learning from Vainglory the team invested a lot of extra time optimizing for performance, faster downloads and the smallest feasible memory footprint across the board. We have also taken an entirely new approach to the back-end services for a more reliable and performant player experience across the board.
The cross-platform learnings from Vainglory also allowed us to bring game controller support in from day one, and makes us ready to rapidly cross-platform once we get the core experience right.
We are super excited to take this next step on our journey for Catalyst Black. Join us as a Founder on our discord (discord.gg/catalystblack) for a chance to participate in the early access program for the game and help shape its future!
We look forward to working with the community to make the game as good as it can be! More information available at catalystblack.com.
Never settle for the lesser evil.