Scavengers puts players in the role of young explorers 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. 

Players will begin each game by equipping their Explorer, venturing into the wilds, competing 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.

Scavengers will allow players to experience vast play spaces, densely populated with satisfying AI combatants and supported by rich simulation of the surrounding world, providing endless emergent gameplay possibilities resulting from the interplay of human competitors and AI adversaries within a large, dynamic world.

Scavengers will build on the game design principles that made Halo 5’s 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 behaviors.

Improbable announced that it has acquired game developer, and Improbable technology partner, Midwinter Entertainment, the developers of the upcoming online action-shooter ‘Scavengers’.

This landmark acquisition by Improbable - the first acquisition of an established studio - signals its further commitment to building and supporting outstanding games which both use and advance Improbable’s SpatialOS game development platform.

Based in Kirkland in Washington state, and co-founded by former ‘Halo’ franchise Creative Director and 343 Industries studio lead Josh Holmes, Midwinter joins Improbable’s recently-announced internal game studios in Canada (led by former BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn) and the UK (led by former DICE and Epic Games Producer John Wasilczyk). 

Midwinter’s debut title, ‘Scavengers’, was announced in March 2018 alongside a multimillion-dollar investment in the game by Improbable. Built using Unreal Engine and Improbable’s SpatialOS cloud-based game development platform, ‘Scavengers’ is a class-based multiplayer shooter with a unique “co-opetition” twist, set in a world devastated by a new ice age. Teams compete to collect resources and battle advanced AI enemies, but must also decide whether to form fragile alliances with opposing teams to overcome the frozen wasteland’s toughest challenges. 

This acquisition is the culmination of a mutually beneficial partnership between Improbable and Midwinter. Midwinter brings to Improbable a high calibre of technical expertise and significant experience developing for AAA games. Their continued contribution to Improbable’s core technology, SpatialOS, will now be streamlined, joining Improbable’s other internal studios in furthering the platform, making it a more useful tool for independent game developers and studios building multiplayer games.

Midwinter will retain creative independence while benefiting from closer technical and organisational integration with SpatialOS, which enables faster, more flexible and innovative game development. 

“I’ve been hugely excited by Midwinter and Scavengers since the first time I talked to Josh,” says Herman Narula, CEO and Co-founder of Improbable. “The game development talent at our studios is world-class and is showing us the way when it comes to using SpatialOS to build and iterate on game worlds quickly to introduce groundbreaking games to market. We are very excited by Scavengers and its potential - but also equally thrilled to see how Josh and his team work alongside our global game studios to build solutions and features that help transform the experience of game development for our customers in the future.”   

“From the beginning, our collaboration with Improbable has been mutually rewarding and this move allows us to join forces to create something bigger and better,” says Josh Holmes, Co-founder and Studio Head at Midwinter Entertainment. “Joining Improbable’s game studios enables us to collaborate more directly with the studios in London and Edmonton, and the SpatialOS platform team. This, in addition to Improbable’s significant investment in the development of Scavengers, will allow us to accelerate our development and bring our vision for the game to life much more vividly than would otherwise be possible.”

The multiplayer “co-opetition” survival shooter will be built with Unreal Engine and powered by Improbable’s SpatialOS game development platform. With these technologies, Scavengers will provide endless emergent gameplay possibilities resulting from the interplay of human competitors and AI adversaries within a large, living world.

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.