A recent
press release backs up the assertion from RocketWerkz founder and CEO Dean Hall that his indie, game development studio is currently hard at work on a AAA multiplayer game thanks to a substantial investment from Chinese conglomerate, Tencent. Hall kept things close to his chest but did tell Eurogamer, "
What I will say is it's multiplayer... That's where we want to be planting our flag in the ground; carving out new territory in terms of new multiplayer genres, or re-purposing different parts of other genres."
Hall went on to clarify that this mystery game is not
Ion, the space survival game RocketWerkz first debuted at E3 2015. Thanks to Tencent's investment in RocketWerkz in 2015, the indie studio has grown from 5 to 26 employees. Elaborating further on the project, Hall stated, "
I think there's a new form of triple-A and people like Garry Newman [of Garry's Mod and Rust fame] have been carving out this territory that I'm a big newcomer to. That's what we're looking at doing, we're looking at trying to approach triple-A without the big ball-and-chain of a publisher and maintain a very experimental avenue as we go about exploring it."
While this news is exciting, I'm sure a lot of gamers are skeptical of anything Dean Hall says after numerous setbacks and delays on DayZ before Hall ultimately left Bohemian and founded RocketWerkz. Though Hall is no longer at Bohemian, many gamers blame him for the fact that three years later, DayZ is still not finished.
About DayZ
DayZ is an open-world, zombie survival game given an Early Access release on Steam in 2013 which garnered numerous awards despite not being a finished product. (Note: Early Access is a funding model used in the gaming industry where consumers pay for an alpha or beta version of the game before its finished. Developers use these funds to continue work and actually complete the game.) Thanks to Early Access funding, DayZ is now currently scheduled to also be released on the Xbox One and PS4. RocketWerkz has informed Early Access investors that the game will not be completed in 2016.