Roller Champions did not launch with a Season 1 like many other live service games. Instead, Ubisoft Montreal’s roller derby-inspired game was released with a preseason, one that has a smaller battle pass and not many planned limited-time events. It’s essentially launched in early access, without actually being early access, giving the team the room to shift gears ahead of Season 1 if need be.
“We’re like 50% set in stone of where we want to go–the other 50% allows us to react, to be able to fix bugs on the fly,” Roller Champions live ops manager Naomi Barnes told GameSpot. “Currently anything that we need to fix on the client side we’ll throw into Season 1. If there’s anything we can fix that’s just a quick server update, we’ll do that, though.”
The Roller Champions team arrived at this plan of action after seeing how Ubisoft’s other live service games have faired over the years–both those that have gone on to be successful and ones that have quickly failed.
“So like Rainbow 6 Siege, For Honor–even Hyper Scape,” Barnes said. “We’ve taken learnings from all of them, including how to work as a dev team. We like to see what’s out there, take some learnings, see how we can work it into our team, and truly make it a roller experience.”
Going forward, the plan is to have Roller Champions continue to grow, adding more arenas to play on and cosmetics to earn. Unlike the month-long preseason, future seasons are currently aiming to be three months long.
“Every season, we will have new arenas,” game director Julia Goriounov said. “Since this game is launching in the summer, we wanted to get the summer vibes in there [at the start].”
“There’s planned content updates, and on the fly updates as well,” Barnes added. “Being a very heavy [live-service] game, it gives us the freedom to be able to do a lot of changes if we need to. That was very important to us to be able to react if we have to.”
Roller Champions is available for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and PC. Preseason continues until June 21–at that point, Season 1 begins.
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