Former Halo and Battlefield developers announce multiplayer ‘co-opetition’ game Scavengers

Midwinter Entertainment, a new game studio established by Josh Holmes, the former studio head and creative director for the Halo franchise at 343 Industries, has announced Scavengers, a multiplayer “co-opetition” team battle game set in a frozen wilderness.

Midwinter Entertainment is formed of games industry veterans whose previous works include Halo 5: Guardians, Battlefield 1, Halo 4, Battlefield 4, Halo: Reach, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: WWII, and much more.

London-based company Improbable will fund the development of Scavengers. Midwinter Entertainment’s work on Scavengers will also help inform the future development of tools and workflows for SpatialOS, Improbable’s cloud-based platform for game development.

Scavengers will build on the game design principles of Halo 5‘s Warzone mode by enabling teams of players to compete with one another while exploring a large game map populated with hundreds of free-roaming and “highly sophisticated” AI enemies, each with “distinct factions, weapons, and behaviors.”

The game will be developed in Unreal Engine 4 and powered by Improbable’s SpatialOS platform to “provide endless emergent gameplay possibilities resulting from the interplay of human competitors and AI adversaries within a large, living world.”

Here is an overview of the game, via Midwinter Entertainment:

Scavengers puts players in the role of young survivors fighting in a not-so-distant future, where cataclysmic events have triggered a new ice age. The game will combine exploration, survival and combat elements, while maintaining a focus on teamwork and cooperative game mechanics.

By dividing the action between multiple servers in the cloud, all of which contribute to building and running a seamless and consistent world, SpatialOS allows more sophisticated artificial intelligence, more AI entities and players occupying a seamless, shared environment, and a larger, more detailed and more deeply simulated game world than can be supported by the traditional client-server architecture used in online gaming.

Players will begin each game by equipping their scavenger, exploring the wilds, fighting and allying with other human players to complete objectives, gathering resources and battling against AI-controlled enemy factions. Large and unpredictable AI populations, combined with the balance of co-operation and competition between the human players, will create rich, repeatable gameplay.

Watch the announcement video below. View a set of concept artworks at the gallery. Visit the official website here.

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