How a Four-Person Studio Is Shaking up the Shooter Market With Over the Top: WWI

Over The Top: WWI from Flying Squirrel Entertainment, based at the Swiss Games Hub in Zurich, was a huge success, peaking at over 7,000 concurrent players on Steam. In this interview, we speak to Maxim Munnig Schmidt, owner and game programmer at Flying Squirrel Entertainment, about the highly competitive shooter market, focusing particularly on third-person shooters. He discusses the success of their game, explaining how he and his team of just four people managed to develop a 200-player WWI sandbox game heavily influenced by the original Star Wars Battlefront titles.

Maxim Munnig Schmidt also talks about the importance of historical authenticity, given that he and his colleagues are progressive/hardcore re-enactors who participate in living history events across Europe. Finally, he explains why it is important to include a single-player component, even in multiplayer games.

GamesMarkt: How would you explain the huge success of Over The Top: WWI? Did you expect it to be so successful?

Maxim Munnig Schmidt: "It took us more than three years to develop Over The Top (OTT) from the drawing board to the launch build, and while we believed our game would turn out to be a success, we didn’t expect it to become this successful so fast, as well as to the amazing members of our community who were supporting us all these years and helping to make OTT the game it is today."

"Different people might like different things in OTT. Some are drawn to the unique atmosphere of WW1 madness, with explosions, machine guns, and officer whistles never going quiet. Others might enjoy the complete destructibility of terrain, including both terrain and buildings. Some players might just like a large-scale multiplayer experience, which OTT provides with up to 200 players on the same map. No matter the reason, we’re glad people like our game and keep coming back."

"The game has a very fresh and unique character, doing a lot of different things than other shooters, and it's even against the trend: the opposite of extraction and hero shooters. Being different from the other games made it easier to stand out and surprise people with that fresh character."

GamesMarkt: How would you categorise Over The Top: WWI within the shooter market? Where does the game stand in the market?

Maxim Munnig Schmidt: "Over The Top is first and foremost a third-person shooter and was designed as such. We were heavily influenced by the original Star Wars Battlefront games, which all of us have thoroughly enjoyed back in the day, and our goal here was to reproduce this old-school core gameplay loop of fighting over objectives on foot and occasionally driving or flying vehicles, but set it up in a chaotic and completely destructible WW1 environment. Consider us to be a mix between Battlefield, the BlackMill games, and some parts of an MMO with the larger scale and built-in sandbox - literally."

"We're aware that many players would like us to deliver a first-person shooter experience (possibly because most of the currently available WW1-themed games are FPS), so we’ve added some functionality to that end and will continue improving it. However, at its core, the game is intended to be played as a third-person shooter."

GamesMarkt: What makes Over The Top: WWI better than current AAA shooters?

Maxim Munnig Schmidt: "Atmosphere and possibilities. The playing field here isn’t remotely level, which is why we cannot really outperform AAA shooters in graphics, optimization, or performance. Of course, we do our absolute best in these fields, but conceptually, we don’t really set ourselves goals like “Be more graphically stunning than Battlefield”, because it’s not the point of the game to begin with, and our studio cannot meet that challenge anyway. The point of Over The Top is to take two fighting sides, give them roughly the same capabilities the warring sides over a century ago had, press start, and have the players transform the map beyond recognition in a whirlpool of wild and fun mayhem."

"We all love and play modern AAA shooters, but they can often be repetitive and have this sterile feel, as if the developers grab your hand and carefully calibrate every moment of your experience, to the point of almost scripting it." - Maxim Munnig Schmidt

"Not us. Every time you start a battle, you have no idea when or how it is going to end. Perhaps the attackers will rapidly advance until they besiege the final objective, or perhaps smartly placed machine guns will shoot their initial charge to pieces, and the round will end with the space between the attacker’s base and the first capture point turning into a moon-like landscape? Nobody can tell in advance because it depends on how each of the up to 200 players chooses to act, and whether any charismatic leaders use the charge whistle at the right moment."

"You can jump into a tank and successfully coordinate with several other players inside to break through the enemy lines. You can join a group of teammates to dig an elaborate trench system that outflanks the enemy's position and helps your team capture it. You can summon a timely artillery barrage as an officer to wipe out the enemy defences seconds prior to the decisive assault. All the while, explosions and digging tools will shift and wear the map beyond recognition, while the crackle of machine guns and the whistle of shells overhead will create a special, immersive atmosphere for you. And if you play a campaign and return to this same map later on, you will find it exactly as deformed as you’ve previously left it, to be deformed even further in your next round."

GamesMarkt: How did a small team of just four people manage to create a 100v100 multiplayer shooter with fully destructible, modifiable battlefields?