Live service games often carry the responsibility of offering different modes to cater to as many players as possible from the get-go. Last Flag, a five-versus-five shooter by Night Street Games, is fully committed to Capture the Flag. The classic mode of finding the enemy's flag and taking it back to your own base is iterated in an array of ways to feel fresh, showcasing what can happen when familiarity is expanded with modern considerations in mind.

We went hands-on with the game last week, completing a tutorial and a bot match during the onboarding process, and then playing a few matches with members of the team. The core loop of the experience goes like this: maps are split into two, and a designated player begins the preliminary time before a match finding a good hiding spot for their team's flag. Once the actual clock starts ticking, the experience is all about trying to locate that tantalizing treasure in the opposite team's half of the map.

It is possible to make a run for it and start searching the inside of every cave and building out there—once you're in proximity of the flag, the game emits a beeping noise—but this takes a considerable amount of time and, well, luck. Thankfully, there's an assortment of radar towers in every map, which act like capture points of sorts. If a tower is in your team's position, it'll periodically sweep the enemy side of its zone, marking a square. When you see marked squares colored red, that means the enemy flag is not hidden there. Over time, you'll have a better idea of where to start searching for it, and which places to avoid completely. The trick is that, all the while, the opposite team will be trying to do the same.

How does Night Street Games design maps with this treasure hunt in consideration? According to game director Matthew Berger, the design grows organically over time. "At the beginning, the map doesn't have a lot of hiding spots," Berger said. "We're mostly focusing on the combat zones and how big the map is and the dimension, and then over time, as we play, as the artists start to [work on] the map, there are just hiding spots that get created over time."

An interesting happenstance comes into play when the quality assurance team begins testing the map, as they keep finding unintended hiding spots. "We keep running into this," Berger said. "There's a big decision that we need to make: Is this a bug? And if it's a bug, do we want to fix it because we don't think it's fun for you to hide the flag there, or do we want to lean into it, in which case we want to make it a little bit less of a bug and more intentional. Sometimes they'll be places that were not intended as hiding spots, and we start to build them out as hiding spots because it turns out that they're fun."

Then, as the team runs playtests internally, certain tendencies come to light, which also help to inform the map design. Some people prefer to hide flags as far away from the middle as possible, making it so there's a bigger area to cover. But, since this can be a common occurrence, flipping things around and picking an unexpected spot close to the middle in a place people don't usually look can be an equally powerful strategy.

This focus on Capture the Flag specifically dates back multiple years. "Dan [Reynolds] and I, he's my brother and co-founder with me, we both grew up playing capture the flag in the woods at night as Boy Scouts," co-founder Mac Reynolds said. "We loved all the Capture the Flag game modes over the years, but none of them really got to the core of what that experience felt like as a kid, which, along with the thrill of nature and sticking across enemy lines and things like that, it was also very much about hide and seek first and foremost."

That thesis fostered the initial concept of Last Flag. As the developers on the team tried to figure out what that experience would be like, they found the game’s look to be particularly challenging, as finding a flag was mostly a matter of luck. That's how the concept of the radar towers came to be. 

"It gives us a chance to have a way to make the game a little more like poker than roulette," Reynolds said. "A little more like, if I play my cards right, I know I have a real shot at winning. So having those towers gives me something to focus on as a team. It gives me these objectives, but we really wanted a game also where you can play your own way, and you don't have to use the towers if that's not the approach you want to take as a team."

Who you choose to play as in Last Flag can also drastically change the experience. There are nine heroes to pick from, ranging from sneaky characters that can turn invisible to those who are there for the thrill of the fight. Yet, the team didn't want to define strict roles. Since matches usually last 15 minutes, with the exception of overtime, each character should be able to do many things.

"You have to be doing hiding, finding, point capture, base assault, base defense, payload escort with the flag, so it's a very multidimensional type of experience, and you have to be dangerous in a lot of circumstances, but we do make the heroes cater to different play styles rather than kind of distinct roles," Reynolds said.

"It's always hard to balance," Berger said. "We have an approach where we're not looking for perfect balance in all situations. Your heroes are going to be stronger in some situations than in others, and it is still an ongoing thing, and we're very careful when we get some feedback that a hero might be a little bit too strong. We're like, okay, but how, what situation, how are we going to adjust that? Because we're constantly playing the game internally and with our rehearsal team, we get a lot of feedback."

These deliberations lead the team to try and find a sweet spot, catering to different playstyles while also making sure that, say, a long-range character doesn't have a huge advantage over a short-range one, and deciding certain adjustments depending on the types of situations these heroes can find themselves in.

The concept of distinct heroes in an online shooter isn't new. Yet, Night Street Games is focusing on what makes Last Flag different first and foremost, and building from there.

"From my angle, from the game itself, it is about making sure that we offer something that other people aren't offering," Berger said. "If we're just gonna make an extraction shooter and color in the margins, if we're just gonna make a battle royale or just a random hero shooter where I'm pushing payloads, there are other games already out there, so why come and try our game?"

"For us, it's high risk and high reward to do a completely different game loop," Reynolds said. "We'd much rather take the risk and try to educate a player on this game loop and get them to see something that's a little bit of a different experience than try to do what other people are doing."

Last Flag will launch on the Epic Games Store sometime in 2026. The open beta is live now.