Scramble Knights Online: Changing Genres to Save a Game
It’s launch day for Scramble Knights Online, an action RPG “MMO-Lite” from our team here at Funktronic Labs. We built a nostalgic kingdom that captures the feeling of adventuring with your friends in the early, simpler days of online gaming. Scramble Knights Online is a day one XBOX Game Pass title!
Scramble Knights Online was not always a MMO – it started as a battle royale PvP game.
Every developer loves their game. Talk to an indie developer making a slot-machine roguelike or a senior-level designer on the latest AAA action game and you will hear their passion.
When I first joined Funktronic Labs, what I remember most was a development team who loved what they were making. Scramble Knights Royale (as it was called then) was a battle royale. It had old-school, top-down combat and you quested, slayed monsters, and looted dungeons while also fighting others in chaotic PvP.
It was nostalgic yet fresh. When we revealed it, the response was solid! Fans on social media immediately understood what we were going for. Then, we had our first public playtest. Players loved the world, exploration, and the sense of adventure. Something was connecting with them, but they were also frustrated with the battle royale elements. Lobbies had emptied out and a large streamer gave up after only a few minutes. “Maybe I’ll check it out some other time,” were their parting words. Commenters constantly said, “I’d play this if it wasn’t for the PvP.”
We went to work fixing the issues, but that feedback stayed with us. After three years of work, we had built a kingdom we wanted to spend time in. The question became: was the battle royale mode making the most of it? It was a hard choice, but our path was clear.
We went straight to work. My job went from marketing a battle royale to figuring out what it was I was going to market. The development team went from fixing networking bugs on a near-final project back to prototyping. Everyone was nervous, but there was also an energy that was not there before. We tried a lot of other PvP modes like Capture the Flag and Team Death Match. There were fun moments, but we kept coming back to the parts between the fighting.
I talked to one of our founders, Eddie Lee, after a day of testing prototypes. He took me back to when Scramble Knights was first taking shape and he repeated one line. “Adventure With Friends.” That was the foundation, the heart and soul of Scramble Knights. The battle royale mode let you team up with a friend and that feeling was there, but what if it became the focus of the whole game?
There was one prototype everyone wanted to make. We called it the “MMO-Lite” version, and all we had written for it was this: “You start in town, you post missions to a quest board, players sign up, ready up, and you depart together. You drop into the world with a quest, you complete it, you return and do it again.”
Making an MMO, even a scaled down “MMO-Lite” as we dubbed it, was the most ambitious of all of our ideas. It would require the most effort by far, but the world, combat, and art style were all foundations we could re-build on. Every meeting we always returned to the idea.
Every developer loves their game and we knew despite the task ahead, this game was ours. So we locked it in.
“Adventure with Friends” was the focus. We were going from a PvP game to co-op PvE with MMO progression systems. We needed better enemies, NPCs, quests, story, crafting, character progression, and more. The momentum was there and the direction felt clear.
We created the Town Square, a hub to meet up before an adventure. The world became a place you could take your time exploring with friends. Dungeons were now a cooperative effort. Returning from a quest with loot was not just a chance to forge better gear, it was a time to interact with others sharing the world with you, even if it was just emoting at each other. The pieces were coming together.
Soon it was time to re-reveal the game. It was not a battle royale anymore, so even the “Royale” in Scramble Knights Royale needed to go. How could we harken back to the early days of MMOs and let people know the game has become something entirely new?
Introducing: Scramble Knights Online.
“Adventure with Friends” became the tagline. In less than six months, we took the world and combat we had spent years building and shaped them into an MMO. We re-built the kingdom of Terracott as an online world for players to explore as a knight-in-training. Players can team up to conquer dungeons, slay monsters, discover rare loot, and return home to forge powerful new gear before setting out on the next quest together.
It took nearly four years of building, a reworked game, and a lot of listening to find our way here. We hope Scramble Knights Online feels like reliving the days of discovering a new online world with your friends. It’s an action RPG with nostalgic top-down combat and an MMO progression system, but it’s also a world where you can just exist and hang out in.
Scramble Knights Online is available now on XBOX Series X|S and XBOX on PC, and included with XBOX Game Pass. With XBOX Play Anywhere, buy once and take your adventure across console, PC, and supported gaming handhelds.
