Tencent Games hosted its annual conference on June 27, and during the conference, the company announced a new game in a cyberpunk style. While the game's official name hasn't been disclosed, the project is code named "SYN."
The Tencent conglomerate has its hands in many gaming development companies such as Riot Games, Epic Games, and Grinding Gear Games, the company that developed the game Path of Exile. While Tencent hasn't made many games outside of its holdings, the company hosts popular multiplayer online games and created the WeGames platform that's heavily used in Asian countries.
Tencent revealed that this new game is being developed at the company's Lightspeed & Quantum Studios. SYN is designed to be an open world first person shooter game that will be coming to both PC and consoles, but the specific consoles that it will be released on were not mentioned during the conference. Tencent Games also revealed a demo trailer that showed off more elements of the game and while the features shown are not guaranteed to be the same in the final product, the tech demo displayed impressively realistic looking characters and settings.
In the tech demo for the game, viewers got to see a glimpse of the character customization screen. Players can customize their character's hair style, makeup, general color scheme, and body type. The hair achieves an incredibly realistic effect thanks to technology utilized in part with Epic Games. The tech demo also shows off cybernetic animal pets that the player can customize the colors of. As well as the animals, players can customize vehicles even as they are still rendering in the game. While these features add to the impressive visuals that the demo displayed, there was no actual gameplay shown in the demo trailer. Fans will have to wait to see more from Tencent Games as the game approaches the release date which is set for some time during 2021.
With new announcements and new acquisitions by Tencent Games, the company can continue to build and connect different developers to create more high quality gameplay and visual effects, like the strand technology from Epic Games that allow for realistic hair texture. It'll be interesting to see where the company goes from here.