Rare, the studio responsible for Sea of Thieves, is currently developing Everwild – now revealed to be another game as a service.
The game is called Everwild and was officially announced at the X019 event in London back in November. It appears to be based around fantasy creatures, perhaps taking some inspiration from Monster Hunter and Dauntless. However, in the trailer, there is no combat seen, so there may be no hostility between players and animals. The art style is very similar to Sea of Thieves, but the game appears to be set in either the countryside or a forest, as there is a lot of greenery and no water in sight.
Other than the trailer, no further information has been released yet, except that the game will appear on the Xbox Game Pass. There is currently no official release date for Everwild.
Everwild does seem to be another game as a service, or GaaS, based on a new trademark filing that has been uncovered. The trademark filing lists software as a service, SaaS, in the details about the new game. It also refers to it as PaaS, or platform as a service. This points to Everwild being another GaaS, but it is unclear how exactly it will approach the model.
Rare’s popular pirate game, Sea of Thieves, uses a co-op model and runs in seasons. The art for Everwild, based on the trailer, is precisely the same style as the art for Sea of Thieves. This could mean that Everwild is a new setting for a similar game model. However, the characters in the trailer are not fighting each other, or the animals, so there is a strong possibility the game will play quite differently than Sea of Thieves.
While the world doesn’t necessarily need any more GaaS models, Everwild could completely refresh the market. To revitalize players however, it will have to be significantly different and bring a whole lot of new to the table. Hopefully, the designers won’t be too reliant on yet more microtransactions to support the game financially.
Source: This Gen Gaming
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