Embark Studios, founded by former Battlefield devs, reveal first look at new game

Embark Studios has revealed an early look at its first game, and it’s looking to be unsurprisingly epic.

While the footage Embark shows off in a recent blog update is brief, it gives us a good idea for what we can expect from the unnamed game. Showing a devastating artillery strike and a gorgeous, large-scale map, the game seems comfortably within the wheelhouse of a studio founded by former Battlefield developers Patrick Söderlund and Rob Runesson.

According to Söderlund, who is also the former Chief Creative Officer at Electronic Arts, the concept for the game “leans heavily into team-based gameplay and puts dynamism, physicality, and destruction front and center.” Sounds familiar.

Obviously, there are noticeable differences between Embark’s game and the EA franchise that made its founders’ careers. Firstly, Embark is building its game in Unreal Engine, not EA’s proprietary Frostbite Engine (which Söderlund led development on). Secondly, it looks like Embark’s game will be a third-person shooter, unlike Battlefield’s usual first-person perspective.

What’s surprising about this reveal is that Embark was originally working on a cooperative game. Back in February 2019, Söderlund stated that Embark was working on a “cooperative free-to-play action game set in a distant future,” and that the studio was using “real-world scanned data” and “procedurally placed objects” to create high-fidelity large scale maps in Unreal. While it seems that a lot of that technology and early protoyping has made its way into the current project, Söderlund stated that the current idea for a PVP shooter was “too irresistible to ignore.”

It’s unclear whether this current project, when it’s released, will remain free-to-play, though Embark is working with open-source developers to both streamline development and bring player-driven creativity to the game. Development still seems to be in its early stages, but it’s out of the prototyping face and in production.

Header: EA; Images: Embark Studios