“The crucial difference between Squads mode and normal Fall Guys,” explains game chief designer Joe Walsh, “is that being eliminated does not completely eliminate you from the game. We have all been in that situation where our teammate is eliminated in the first round and they have to sit and watch you compete. And there’s this pressure to be like, ‘Well, maybe we should just go back and go to the main menu and try again. ‘It allows you to basically act as a team. “
Squads mode will institute a scoring system for most rounds of the game. In race rounds, players will be scored depending on where they crossed the finish line, with the teams with the lowest overall score eliminated after all players have finished. Survival rounds will give players one point for every second they survive, again eliminating the teams with the lowest scores.
The Fall Guys developers are very excited about how it can change strategies for playing a few rounds. Walsh gives us an example: “If one of your players in your squad manages to make a mistake in Perfect Match and is the first person to fall, you essentially know that if you don’t get other people eliminated, you will be eliminated, because now you is paralyzed for the rest of the round. So it’s really interesting because your team kind of goes on the offensive and tries to eliminate other people. , it will be very interesting to see how it develops over time. “
Perhaps more interesting are the Final Rounds – they will still give victory to the last player standing, or to the first to cross the line, but that victory now goes to an entire team. This obviously encourages teams to work together to bring a player to the end of the round: “So,” says Walsh with a smile, “if three of you are left against two other players, and you have a strong presence in the Hex, it may be worth it. sorry for two of you just going there to sabotage, basically throwing yourself out and grabbing other people for your destruction. “
The team element also means that some normal Fall Guys rounds have been converted into tense final rounds. Fall Ball, for example, now pits two teams against each other in a grand final of a football match. “Season 4 will have three times as many final rounds as any other mode,” says Walsh, “which will be really, really fun. And I’m really excited to have Fall Ball four against four deciding the winner of a show. I think it will be a very, very interesting thing to do. It’s something we’ve always wanted to do. “The mode changes the appearance of Fall Guys, but it shouldn’t change its economy much. When we talked, Mediatonic did not have a final decision on how the mode would reward the winners, but given that it is theoretically easier to win the game, Walsh said the rewards should be “slightly less” than the main game – probably using the new one. Crown fragment system.
One thing that will definitely be easier, however, is the notoriously more difficult conquest and trophy for Fall Guys. ‘Infallible’ asks you to win five full episodes of Fall Guys in a row. And yes, team victories count for that – “In theory, we make it four times easier for people to win this trophy,” says Walsh. “I said in an interview six months ago, I was like, ‘Let’s make it easier with time, for players to get that trophy.’ And it is this future that I was talking about. So, we finally arrived. “
Fall Guys’ fourth season has a sci-fi theme and begins on Monday, March 22. It will also bring costumes among us with unique and mysterious characteristics.
Joe Skrebels is the Executive News Editor at IGN. Follow him on Twitter. Do you have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Send an email to [email protected].