DayZ was a really popular mod for Arma 2, propelling creator Dean Hall to some fame, and a job with developer Bohemia Interactive, which he left in 2014. Now, Hall has his own Rocketwerkz studio and is working on a new game with an influx of cash from Chinese publisher Tencent.

"What I will say is it's multiplayer," he told Eurogamer. "We're really drawing a line in the sand here and saying ... that's where we want to be planting our flag in the ground; carving out new territory in terms of new multiplayer genres, or re-purposing different parts of other genres. I believe it's a gap in the market," he added. "For that reason I'm going to be pretty coy about exact specifics of it - also because of expectations and how experimental we are at the moment."

He said he was deliberatley being tightlipped about the project to avoid a copycat scenario similar to what happened with The War Z closely resembling DayZ in 2013.

We do know that the game is not Ion, a game announced at E3 2015 as a collaboration with tech company Improbable. And we also know that because of an infusion of cash from partner Tencent, Hall has grown his studio fro five to 26 people since last year. "The studio will keep growing as much as we can but it will maintain the cell structure," he said. "So in a lot of cases, you're talking about teams around the seven size, and some of those cells will gravitate together around larger projects. And with this big project that is exactly what it is. It started out as independent cells working on different stuff who sort of end up on the same track and their work melds together."

He said that he has been able to entice staff from Bethesda, Bohemia and Creative Assembly to join the team. And the project will hopefully be a AAA quality game without a publisher, Hall said.

"I think there's a new form of AAA and people like Garry Newman (creator of Garry's Mod) have been carving out this territory that I'm a big newcomer to," he said. "That's what we're looking at doing. We're looking at trying to approach AAA without the big ball-and-chain of a publisher and maintain a very experimental avenue as we go about exploring it."