Ex-BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn departed the company in 2017. The 17-year studio veteran left the company a few months after the lackluster launch of Mass Effect: Andromeda, stepping down in favor of then-Mass Effect Director Casey Hudson.
However, Flynn’s resignation from BioWare wasn’t the end of his career, as he joined Improbable Worlds Limited’s Edmonton Studio as General Manager in 2018. Now, Flynn and his team are preparing to show the gaming public what they’ve been working on since he departed from BioWare. He announced on Twitter that Improbable intends to reveal its new title during The Game Awards on December 9th.
Again, few people outside the company know much about what Flynn and his small team have been working on for the last several years. What little the public knows is that Improbable’s upcoming game is an online RPG utilizing Unreal Engine 4 and the company’s proprietary SpatialOS technology. Little else is publicly confirmed, other than that the company gave Flynn himself a great deal of creative control. Fortunately, gamers only have to wait until The Game Awards in a few days to find out.
For those who haven’t heard of it, SpatialOS is a cloud-based technology designed to allow for extraordinary large multiplayer environments with an enormous number of players on a single server. Flynn discussed this a bit during an interview with the UK-based publication PC Games Insider in 2019. He explained that scale is an essential factor in the game’s development, as the studio sees it as an opportunity to test the boundaries of SpatialOS technology. However, Flynn stressed that Improbable Edmonton isn’t just shooting for numbers. Instead, the team focuses on seeing how it can use the technology to craft an ideal RPG experience.
“We’ve often talked about this and said that our favorite RPGs are ones that really embrace empowerment,” Flynn said in the 2019 interview, “you can say what you want to say, go where you want to go, make the choices that you want to make and really get back to role-playing.” He went on to explain that he hoped the technology would allow for an immense degree of player freedom while allowing players to interact and form meaningful bonds with each other. In some ways, it sounds like Flynn hopes the new game will recapture the spirit of the tabletop role-playing games that inspired the modern RPG genre.
This is further evidenced by Flynn’s talk of an RPG “renaissance.” He sees the upcoming game as a way to create an RPG that refocuses on the core aspect of role-playing, which he believes has been watered down in recent years. Of course, many developers have high hopes for big projects, especially when using new technology. The only question is if Flynn’s game can meet those lofty goals.
Again, players know little about Improbable’s new game other than the tech involved. Fortunately, that will change after the reveal during The Game Awards on Thursday. Hopefully, it gives fans a reason to feel optimistic about Improbable’s ambitious MMO.
Source: PC Games Insider