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Cambridge Venture Partners have invested $10 million into British independent game studios and Deceit developer, Automaton. The funds are to help develop a new game using Improbable’s SpatialOS engine.
The game, which does not have a name yet, is to be an MMO tactical shooter. The project will feature a large world with a 12km x 12km explorable environment, MMO story and narrative elements along with social hubs and have 1,000 concurrent players in a shared MMO instance.
In addition to the MMO element, there will be a ‘last man standing’ PvP arena mode in a similar vein to the wildly successful battle royale game style used by Arma 3 mod Day-Z, H1Z1 and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The idea is to have up to 400 players combatting in this mode.
The game is being developed by Automaton using SpatialOS and Crytek’s CryEngine, with the former’s cloud-based development platform being a key component. “Our goal at Improbable is to give developers the power to make previously impossible games,” said Improbable’s co-founder and CEO, Herman Narula.
“With Deceit, Automaton Studios proved that they could make a tense, engaging multiplayer game. We’re excited by their vision for this new game. The survival genre is seeing a huge amount of attention and excitement, and we’re excited to see what this talented team can do with the massive scale, persistent world and rich systems made possible by SpatialOS.”
"We’ve spent the last two years building the technology for a next-generation massively multiplayer online game that requires an entirely new approach to game design and development,” added Automaton CEO, James Thompson.
“This project delivers an unprecedented fidelity and scale of world simulation and complex interactions between authored and player-driven content. I’m hugely excited that our next step is deploying this $10m investment to bring the game to launch in 2018. SpatialOS was an extremely natural fit for the platform on which to build our world simulation, since its paradigm fits squarely with the approaches we have taken to design a huge, dynamic virtual world, and we’re extremely excited to showcase what we’ve been able to achieve together in the coming year."
