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 revealed that a new Scavengers technical playtest weekend is scheduled for Sept 18-20, and encourages players to sign up for the playtest weekend before the closed beta later this year.

Players who participate in the Technical Playtest weekend will get a first look at new character designs, as well as newly revealed gameplay features that includes cutting-edge large-scale PvEvP battles featuring hundreds of advanced AI enemies and creatures across an expanded 9km2 map. The Technical Playtest weekend represents a crucial development milestone and allows new players to provide feedback to the development team at this pre-Alpha stage.

“The team at Midwinter is committed to an open, community-driven development environment,” said Josh Holmes, CEO and Creative Director of Midwinter Entertainment. “For more than a year we’ve been quietly testing with thousands of players from our community, whose invaluable contributions have refined, expanded, and validated our vision for Scavengers. As we prepare for Closed Alpha and Beta later this year, we’re looking to expand our community and use this pre-alpha playtest window to provide us with critical learnings leading into our launch.”

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.