Mavericks is engineered with a focus on performance, stability, and strategic gameplay — we've created a great foundation to bring Battle Royale to a place it deserves.

Enter the Proving Grounds, a place where you can show what you're made of in the ultimate fight to the death experience.

Mavericks: Proving Grounds is made possible thanks to Improbable’s groundbreaking technology, SpatialOS. SpatialOS is a cloud-based platform for creating games that go beyond the design limitations of traditional server architectures, allowing developers to build massive, living, persistent worlds with player populations that were previously impossible.

Mavericks’ battle royale will also feature a 1000-player mode that will break the battleground and offer a revolutionary multiplayer experience. Available shortly after launch, these 1000-player battles will feature five-player squads dropped into a continually shrinking section of the game’s 16x16km (100 square miles) map to compete to the last team standing. 200 to 400-player solo and squad games will be available as standard from Mavericks’ early access release later in the year.

Two days before it was supposed to launch, Automaton Games has delayed Mavericks: The Forge, it's first serious testing phase before going public shortly thereafter.

Today we are announcing a delay to the release of Mavericks: The Forge. We originally planned to open The Forge to our Founders on Thursday 20th September ahead of a public launch several weeks later. Now Founders will get first access to The Forge on Thursday 29th November.

We understand that this news will come as a huge disappointment to our community. And we know that we have previously shifted the date for playable content, so believe us when we say it was a hard decision for the team to make - and one we're sorry to be announcing so close to our intended launch. Whilst it won't ease the pain, we did want to offer a little insight into what we've been focused on in the last couple of weeks and why we felt it was necessary to delay.

When we announced The Forge, we emphasised how this would enable our Founders and extended community to become an invaluable part of the Mavericks development process. That is still very much the case - particularly in the early weeks when Founders have exclusive access. To do that to the best of our ability, we need to be able to gather and analyse player data to help us drive meaningful improvements to the game.

We designed Mavericks to be groundbreaking by nature, and we've come to the realisation over the past few weeks that we needed more advanced tools to handle the level of analytics we are going to be dealing with, and that traditional solutions currently do not meet our requirements. We're taking steps to fix that, meaning we will have a more powerful and granular toolset at our disposal which we will integrate with The Forge's launch. However, this has also required us to make additional adjustments to gameplay that ensure both a smoother online experience for players and allow us to collect the important data we need.

The added complexity of this has also required us to spend additional time focusing on infrastructure around the game. We have more developers working on making sure that everything is in place for when the The Forge launches, including fundamental work to ensure currently unloved areas (*cough* the website *cough*) are launch ready.

Despite all of this, we know that there's no dressing up bad news. We respect that many of our Founders paid money for access in August or September and just writing another apology doesn't cut it (even if it's a pretty good one). That's why we're offering a couple of things.

Firstly, we wanted to give a small gesture of our appreciation to our Founders and community for being patient. Founders who signed up before this announcement will receive an additional 3 months of Citizenship membership on top of their 12-month subscription; non-Founders who have signed-up for the previous beta announced at E3 will receive complimentary 1-month Citizenship access once the game economy goes live. For more information on Citizenship read this page.

Secondly, whilst we ask that you bear with us over the next several weeks as the team works around the clock to bring you The Forge, we understand that there may be a few very unhappy customers. That's why we'll be accepting refund requests. If you no longer wish to be a Founder and would like a refund, we'll be able to provide one. We'll start this process on Friday and will update this blog post with information on how you can apply for a refund that same morning.

The Forge is just around the corner and we are excited about the thousands of you who will be joining us in Mavericks for the first time. We believe we are making the biggest and most immersive multiplayer shooter ever made. Your feedback during The Forge will help make it possible.

We hope this blog covers all the questions you may have around the delay. If that's not the case, we'll be hosting a Reddit AMA on Thursday at 1pm BST. Details will be posted in the Mavericks Discord channel and on Twitter (@PlayMavericks) tomorrow.

We thank you for your passion, patience and support. Rest assured that we are working as hard as ever and, whilst that means a bit of a delay, we know it'll be worth the wait.

Players joining the Mavericks: Proving Grounds beta can expect a genre-defining experience including advanced gameplay systems such as destructible environments, unique and dynamic wildlife and terrain deformation. This makes Mavericks the world’s only persistent, living world battle royale game.

Mavericks: Proving Grounds will release in two phases: the battle royale mode in Winter 2018, supplemented by a persistent open world in 2019.