• News

'Co-opetition' Survival Shooter Scavengers Revealed, Sounds A Lot Like Destiny

Destiny, Destiny 2, and The Division have laid the groundwork. Is a new dev team with some heavy hitters going to take the genre to the next level?

Charles Singletary Jr

March 19, 2018 6:15 AM

3

Midwinter Entertainment, the new development team featuring former Halo and Farmville devs, has revealed their flagship game Scavengers. Details are scarce, but this debut will be a survival shooter set in a freezing post-apocalyptic setting.

Co-opetition. See that word. Remember it. I personally never heard that before Scavengers was announced, but that’s what the devs are calling their ambitious undertaking. With a mixture of PvE and PvP elements, it sounds like the Midwinter team is working on a connected shooter similar to Destiny and The Division. It’s all speculation at this time, so take it with a grain of salt, but the team stands to make a significant leap in a genre that doesn’t have a lot of competition yet. Anthem is another title that seems to be headed down a similar path, but that game’s development is getting a bit turbulent.

The game will be built with Unreal Engine and, revealed in a blog post on Improbable.io, "will build on the game design principles that made Halo 5: Guardians' Warzone a revolutionary new mode for Halo players, by allowing 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, with distinct factions, weapons and behaviours."

The portfolios of the team working on Scavenger will play a part in the game’s potential success, as will that team’s awareness of missteps by Bungie and Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft, but another element could be the platform that powers it.

Consider this the second major title revealed to be taking advantage of SpatialOS. The first involved a dev team that secured $10 million in funding for PUBG-like, 1000 player game. This cloud-based computational platform from Improbable may be one of the sleeper topics of gaming in 2018, a year completely dominated by the battle royale genre thus far. Considering some well-known developers are staking their careers on it, expect Shacknews dive deep into the technology in the near future. Stay tuned for more details on Scavengers as well.

Charles Singletary Jr

News Editor

Charles Singletary Jr keeps the updates flowing as the News Editor, breaking stories while investigating the biggest topics in gaming and technology. He's pretty active on Twitter, so feel free to reach out to him @The_CSJR. Got a hot tip? Email him at Charles.Singletary@Shacknews.com.