Fairgames: when team heisting becomes an Olympic sport
The Haven studio, under Sony's umbrella, is cooking up something peculiar: Fairgames, a cooperative shooter where "playing as a team" literally means planning heists. Imagine Ocean's Eleven but with more connection errors and fewer elegant suits. The game proposes matches where groups of players compete to loot virtual safes, because apparently in the future capitalism still exists, but now it's fun. 💸
The art of blending genres without it exploding
Fairgames attempts to fuse two worlds: the silent tension of stealth games with the controlled chaos of battle royales. The result should be an experience where every decision counts, although it's most likely to end up as a festival of random screams and stray bullets. The developers promise a perfect balance between stealth and action, which technically means you can fail spectacularly in two different ways.
"It's a fresh concept that reinvents competitive cooperation" - said some executive who clearly has never seen how people play online.
The harsh lessons from early development
The closed tests under the name Project Hearts have left some valuable lessons:
- The controls were so rigid they made a tank seem agile
- The transitions between game modes resembled dial-up internet
- The physics of objects had its own artistic interpretation
But hey, that's what early tests are for: to discover that your game doesn't work before the public does. 🎮
The challenges of creating a convincing virtual world
For 3D artists and level designers, Fairgames presents interesting challenges:
- Creating detailed urban environments optimized for multiplayer
- Designing lighting systems that work for both stealth and action
- Developing animations that look good in first and third person
And all this while dealing with the most unpredictable thing of all: human players, those beings capable of breaking any perfectly designed system in seconds.
The long road to 2026
With a tentative release date for 2026, Fairgames still has an extensive development period ahead. Enough time to improve it completely or for the industry to forget it existed. Meanwhile, the studio keeps iterating, adjusting, and probably drinking a lot of coffee, because creating a modern multiplayer game is like building a plane in mid-flight. ✈️
So if you ever dreamed of being a white-collar thief but lacked the courage (or skills), soon you'll be able to live that fantasy from your sofa. And if everything goes wrong, you can always blame your teammates. After all, in cooperative games, cooperation is optional.