Vortex Gaming

It's hard to find these days, but 'Capture the Flag,' where you steal the opposing team's flag and return to your base, was a very popular multiplayer mode from the early 2000s. Looking at its origins, it was used for training in North American armies from the early 20th century, and later developed into a recreational sport enjoyed by Boy Scouts in the fields.

Clear rules about winning and losing, and the mental battle that takes place in the process of stealing and defending the flag, were the perfect material to implement into a game, especially with shooter genres like FPS. It's no coincidence that games that swept through an era, including 'Quake,' each had a Capture the Flag mode.

In that context, 'Last Flag,' announced by the new game developer Knight Street Games at this year's Summer Game Fest, can be said to be a game that puts its heart and soul into 'Capture the Flag' for the first time in a long time. We took a look at the first impressions of the game through an exclusive playtest with the developers to see how they plan to breathe new life into 'Capture the Flag,' which can be said to be a historically deep, fundamental game.

'Imagine Dragons' lead vocalist brothers making a real Capture the Flag?

Before talking about the game in earnest, 'Knight Street Games' is a company with a very interesting history for a new game developer. It's quite unique from the start that it's a game development company founded by Dan Reynolds, the lead vocalist of the rock band 'Imagine Dragons,' famous to Korean gamers for the League of Legends World Championship (롤챔스) theme song, and his brother Mac Reynolds.

According to Mac Reynolds, whom I met at the last GDC, he and Dan spent countless hours playing 'Capture the Flag' as Boy Scouts when they were young. As they grew older, online games were indispensable between the brothers. However, the brothers, who played Capture the Flag games that spread like wildfire in the early 2000s, both thought that they weren't getting the 'real (Capture the Flag) taste'.

After a long time, they decided to start a game company to create the most fun version of 'Capture the Flag' they could imagine. Mac Reynolds said, "We focused on forming a team with people who are passionate about game development," and jokingly added that they gave extra points (?) to people who didn't know Imagine Dragons. It wouldn't have been easy not to know this band, which has 32.7 million YouTube subscribers and hundreds of millions of views per music video, but that meant they wanted to gather people who were serious about game development.

Among the developers who gathered in this way, there were many people with unique backgrounds. A team was formed with former Blizzard developers, as well as blue-eyed developers who had worked at Nexon and NCSoft (!). And they are still struggling to complete 'Last Flag' today.

Now that the game has just been revealed, Knight Street Games plans to conduct an alpha test of 'Last Flag' within this year.

Start by hiding the flag! 'Last Flag' Gameplay

As this playtest was an internal test build conducted on a limited number of people, 'Last Flag' still has a long way to go. However, after playing a few rounds, my impression was that it was very intuitive, the rules were clear, and above all, it was incredibly immersive.

First of all, the rules of the game have not changed significantly from traditional Capture the Flag. You win by bringing the opponent's flag, planting it in our base, and defending it for a certain amount of time. The rules are so intuitive that even someone who has never played Capture the Flag in their life can picture it in their head.

However, rather than changing the rules of traditional Capture the Flag, 'Last Flag' decided to add depth to it. As a result, elements not seen in traditional genres have been added to the game, but these elements did not detract from its unique intuitiveness.

The gameplay features that can be seen in 'Last Flag' can be described as follows.

1. You can decide where to hide the flag yourself

Before starting the game, in the character selection stage, you can decide who among the team members will hide the flag. People who want to hide the flag can press the volunteer button, and if no one volunteers, a person to hide the flag is randomly selected.

After the game starts, you are given the opportunity to hide the flag somewhere on the map for 1 minute. About half of the map, based on the minimap, is 'our' area, and you can place the flag anywhere within it. You can use your creativity to hide the flag in a deep cave, behind a tree, or even on the top of a house that is difficult to climb.

The 'Capture the Flag' modes that have been shown in various games so far have mainly focused on 'combat' to steal the flag, which is fixed in the opponent's base. However, 'Last Flag' has succeeded in strengthening the element of 'exploration' just by adding the process of hiding the flag.

However, since the map is quite large, you may waste time hiding the flag if you wander around. If you fail to hide the flag within the time limit, it will be placed randomly in a pre-determined hiding spot.

And finding the flag hidden in this large map by walking around is possible, but it is a very arduous task. As a system to help with this, the game utilizes three 'radar towers' located in the center of the map.

2. You can capture a base (radar tower) to find the location of the opponent's flag

The radar tower follows the rules of 'domination', which is often seen in typical team-based shooters. If you occupy the tower, you can recover health in the surrounding area, and you can also take a tube that allows you to move straight back to the tower when you die.

However, the most important feature of the radar tower in this game is that the more you occupy the tower, the more the location of the opposing team's flag will gradually be revealed. The occupied tower sends radar waves to the opposing area at regular intervals, and when you look at the minimap at this time, you can see the tiles in the space where there is no flag being filled with color one by one.

Since there is no flag in the colored area, you can slowly narrow down the places to explore, right?

Also, the reason why there are three radar towers in the center of the map is clear. Based on the minimap, each tower emits a wave that searches 3x5 squares in a straight line. For example, if our team hid the flag near Tower C, it means that it would be difficult to detect it even if the opposing team was occupying Tower A.

3. Cash Bot (cute) located in the middle of the map

In addition, there are cute 'Cash Bots' in the field. They are NPCs that you can't miss because they are marked with icons on the minimap, and if you defeat them, you can deliver funds to all team members.

Since funds are used to upgrade the skill performance of each character, defeating Cash Bots also plays a very important role. It seems to be a system partially borrowed from the MOBA genre, and it seems possible to prepare powerful firepower by collecting cash faster than the opposing team.

During the 1 minute after the game starts to hide the flag, players who do not have the flag are given the opportunity to roam the field and hunt Cash Bots. If you make good use of this opportunity, you can start the early part with a higher skill level.

4. 5vs5 multiplayer where role division is more important than ever

As listed above, 'Last Flag' has placed various elements on the field that can contribute to victory, centering on the core Capture the Flag. In addition, since the map size itself is large enough to hide the flag in various places, the cooperation of five team players is more important than ever.

I felt that not only is it important to set up a good strategy for the team to win, but also to distribute personnel. You have to think about how many people will go into occupying the radar tower, and it is also possible to contribute to the team by hunting Cash Bots while the team members are occupying the base. Sometimes, you can become a hero who sneaks into the enemy camp alone and finds only the flag, like a Seeker in Quidditch in 'Harry Potter'.

That doesn't mean you can just keep doing the same role. The situation changes from moment to moment, and you can't always guarantee that our team will maintain an advantageous situation. If the opponent is gradually narrowing down the location of our team's flag, then players who fall into the role of defending the flag are also needed. Whether to focus on complete defense, or to search the opposing area with a glimmer of hope in the meantime, depends entirely on the player's strategy.

In this way, the role division of 'Last Flag' must change very organically depending on the progress of the game, so communication was also more important than ever. It seemed that systems such as pinging were basically prepared, but I was worried that smooth communication would not be possible without voice chat.

5. All-out war that starts when one side finds the flag

If the battle to confront each other in the field and find the location of the flag continues like this, eventually the flag of one side will be exposed to the opponent. And then the flow of the game clearly changes. From this point on, it continues in the form of an all-out war to prevent the opponent from taking the flag to the base.

If you acquire the flag in the opponent's area (the upper half based on the minimap), the opposing team will receive a message that the flag has been stolen, and the opposing players who see this will chase the player holding the flag all at once to recover the flag. However, since the location of the flag is not visible on the minimap, the process of searching is needed even here.

However, things change after crossing the border in the center of the map. This is because the location of the opposing team's flag is specified on the minimap when it enters our team's area. All opposing team players can now see the exact location of the flag, and a full-scale battle is inevitable to bring the flag to the base.

If you are lucky enough to repel the enemy's offensive to recover the flag, you need to wait for 1 minute after placing the flag at the base. From the opponent's point of view, this is the last chance to recover the flag again within that 1 minute. A true 'teamfight' occurs here, and the ultimate skills that have been saved up are unfolded here and there. If you succeed in defending the flag for 1 minute, the game ends, and if the opposing team succeeds in recovering the flag, it leads to another all-out war.

One thing to keep in mind is that if our team's flag is stolen, you cannot 'plant' the opposing team's flag by bringing it to the base. Therefore, the phenomenon of two teams planting each other's flags at the same time does not occur, and somehow defending our flag and planting the opponent's flag is the only key to victory.

Last Flag Expectation Points: Solidness felt in the 'fundamental' mode

Although it was just a playtest that I only enjoyed for about an hour mixed with the developers, 'Last Flag' had an 'attraction' that drew players in from the development stage build. Of course, there were some rough parts here and there, but I could really focus solely on the game.

The fact that it has this sense of immersion from a build that has not been released to the public means that the rules of the game are clear. It is also an undeniable part that most elements are easy to understand to the point of exciting outsiders who have just installed the client.

As mentioned above, 'Last Flag' has added a 5vs5 shooter where the skills of heroes shine to the slightly old rule of Capture the Flag. In addition, by adding rules familiar to gamers around the world, such as base capture, anyone can see how the situation is flowing.

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience that was hard to believe it was a development build, but personally, the 'hiding the flag' part was the most satisfying element. If the alpha test starts within this year, I am looking forward to meeting various gamers who hide the flag in really bizarre places.

What do you think of the gameplay of 'Last Flag', which is being introduced for the first time in Korea? If you are an interested gamer, please check the Steam page below for more information.

웹진 인벤김규만 기자
2025-06-07