Best known for its work on the Just Cause series of open-world sandbox games, Avalanche Studios has dabbled in many video game genres, but it certainly seems to have a specific niche. Dieselpunk chaos and burning stretches of desert road abound in games like Rage 2 and Mad Max, and, if a recent job listing on Avalanche Studios’ website is to be believed, its next game will follow in a similar vein.
An open call to fill a vacant Gameplay Animator role with Systemic Reaction, a creative division within Avalanche Studios—which technically rebranded as Avalanche Studios Group in 2020—the website lays out the duties and responsibilities of the position. It’s mostly standard fare, though keen readers can parse some information concerning the studio’s mysterious upcoming project. Among the list of required skills for the position is a bullet point denoting experience animating weapon-wielding human characters in first and third person as well as “scary robotic characters.”
Precisely what constitutes a scary robotic character is anyone’s guess, but Avalanche’s previous titles may provide some insight on the matter. First debuted in 2019, Generation Zero—which is currently available via Xbox Game Pass—is a co-op shooter which borrows elements from games like STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and Horizon Zero Dawn. A quest to survive in a Cold War-era European countryside overrun by maniacal mechs, the unique premise helps to outshine the game’s relatively meager budget. If “scary robotic characters” are to appear in a future title associated with Avalanche Studios, they’ll likely take influence from the robots seen in this title.
Avalanche Studios and Systemic Reaction released a co-op title in a similar vein in 2020. The Early Access title Second Extinction feels a bit like a cross between Destiny and Monster Hunter, and it sees players team up to hunt down dinosaurs in a bizarre mix of far future and distant past. While it doesn’t feature any robotic enemies, it could be an example of Avalanche Studios’ typical style espoused in the job listing.
There’s no mention of any specific game currently in development, but the hiring is most likely related to Contraband, a collaboration between Avalanche Studios and Xbox Game Studios which was revealed during E3 2021. Said to be an open-world co-op shooter set in the mid-70s, it certainly seems to fit the Avalanche archetype. That said, very little is known about the game, but scary robotic enemies don’t quite seem to fit the theme, so it's quite possible that Avalanche's job listing is for something else entirely.