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.

Midwinter Entertainment has opened the PC Closed Beta for their upcoming survival shooter Scavengers, so explorers eager to scour the frozen wasteland can sign up for the Closed Beta at the official website.

Places are limited, with 50,000 keys available, but returning players who have either registered for or participated in previous technical playtests will automatically be granted access. The Closed Beta is live now and runs through to Tuesday, December 22nd at 2 am GMT / 3 am CET (December 21st, 6 pm PST).

“Today’s the beginning of an exciting new phase for Scavengers,” said Josh Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Midwinter Entertainment. “The community has always been the core foundation of our development ethos. Closed Beta allows us to expand that community to tens of thousands of new players, each experiencing Scavengers for the first time, and playing a vital part in its continued development.”  

Closed Beta drops players into a hostile frozen wasteland, where squads of three compete to survive and score datapoints against rival teams. Explorers are equipped with a combination of powerful abilities and signature weaponry to tackle the challenges of a vast strategic battleground that blends sandbox-style PvE and class-based PvP. 

The Scavengers Closed Beta also introduces Roaming Bosses. The first to be revealed is ‘Sluka’ - a gargantuan Scourge that randomly spawns towards the end of a match to stalk remaining Explorers. Roaming Bosses offer an incredible threat but yield substantial reward for Explorers brave enough to take on the imposing challenge. Additionally, players will also face smaller bosses scattered throughout the map, including the hammer-wielding Outlander, ‘Warlord’. 

Scavengers is also coming to Early Access in early 2021.

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.

Scavengers is in development for PS4, Xbox One and PC, scheduled for 2021.