Orbifold: A Zero-Gravity Shooter Set Within a Massive, Otherworldly Sphere Resembling an Intense Halo Map

Back in 2020, Half-Life: Alyx developer Robin Walker told Katharine (RPS in peace) that one of the hardest things in first-person shooter development is persuading people to look up. “One of the problems you always run into in an FPS is that players are really good at looking horizontally with their mouse, but they don’t look up and down nearly as much,” said Walker. “You’ve really got to work to make a player look up in FPS games.”

You will definitely need to look up in Orbifold, a forthcoming shooter project from Hi-Rez programmer Chris Cullen. In this Unreal Engine 5 creation, firefights take place inside a giant, verdant ball akin to a miniature Dyson Sphere, but with no captive star. Players are gravitationally rooted to the exterior of the ball, meaning you can run all the way around the inside. There are also Halo-style launchers that punt you directly through the middle. Here’s a slice of very WIP footage featuring some airborne android nuisances.

Cullen has been working on Orbifold in his spare time for a few years. The game doesn’t have a store page or presskit just yet, though Cullen did show it off at an event in Auckland, New Zealand last year. I’ve scraped together a few more details from the project’s Xitter feed, with the stern caveat that all of this is, again, in a state of evolution, and that certain features might be abandoned.

Cullen mentions rivers that flow around the inside of the sphere, tunnels and elevators beneath the surface, an upgrades system, various enemy android classes, co-op multiplayer, and a level editor that could be released alongside the game. Among the recent reveals is a Saturn Blast ability that lets you palm strike yourself skyward – this reminds me of Pharah’s Concussive Blast in Overwatch. Catch a video of it below.

Most tempting of all, for my money, are Cullen’s ideas for grenades. He envisages slapstick varieties that launch attackers right across the sphere. You can imagine a co-op scenario where players punt groups of foes back and forth as though playing robot tennis.

You can imagine all kinds of things. Come, let us bask in the glow of hypotheticals. I’d love to see a Halo Warthog driver attempt to make sense of these conditions. I’d love to see players, enemies and pieces of debris getting stuck in a Lagrangian point at the sphere’s centre. Ah, Lawbreakers, you died too young. A little less explosively, the playspace also recalls the ringworld from the amazing Outer Wilds DLC expansion Echoes Of The Eye.

Hopefully Cullen will treat us to a proper announcement in the not-too-distant future. I’m not sure what exactly he does at Hi-Rez Studios, but it’s obviously worth noting that, Paladins and Smite aside, Hi-Rez are the creators of the momentous, gravity-snubbing FPS Tribes: Ascend. They sold the rights to that series to a spin-off subsidiary, Prophecy Games, in 2019. Prophecy released Tribes 3: Rivals in 2023, but it didn’t set the internet alight and the developers have now shifted their attention elsewhere.