Report: Activision Is Working on an Open-World Game With a Reactive Environment

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When companies are not busy chasing trends like games as a service, they go after big-budget hits. And very few games can match the sales of the GTA and Cyberpunk 2077 series.

GTA 6 is unrivaled, but its open-world style is used in other games too. Cyberpunk 2077 also made its mark, and more and more games are copying it.

Now, Activision has a new open-world project in the works at Elsewhere, a new studio that has brought in veteran developers from prominent studios like CD Projekt Red and Naughty Dog. The game is built around emergent gameplay, and it looks set to take on the biggest names in the genre.

RELATED Halo Under Activision's Banner Might Just be What the Franchise Needs Earlier this week, Microsoft's Xbox division announced that Activision, not Halo Studios, will develop the next Halo game.

Elsewhere Is Hiring for an Ambitious Project

The Elsewhere project is taking shape, and it is certainly ambitious. In fact, the studio urgently needs staff, as a recent job posting confirms. The posting asks for an Associate Animation Director, who will have two main jobs: creating interactions in a dynamic world and defining emergent gameplay. It never names GTA or Cyberpunk, but the kind of game it describes puts Elsewhere in the same space.

The job description reads, “You’ll help us by guiding the development of scalable animation systems that support emergent gameplay, contextual behaviors, and dynamic world interactions.”

In case you don’t know, emergent gameplay is when a game’s systems, like its AI, physics, and world rules, work together in ways the developers never scripted. Nobody plans the moment ahead of time. It just happens when the systems run into each other, so every player ends up with their own stories.

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GTA 5 is the best-known example. Say you pick a fight with a civilian, who runs off and bumps into a gang member. The gang member pulls a gun and accidentally shoots a nearby cop car. Suddenly the police are in a huge shootout with the gang while you just stand back and watch. No one wrote that scene. The game’s AI systems created it on their own.

With that in mind, these are broad terms, but they give us a good idea of what kind of game Elsewhere is making. It seems to also focus on reactive gameplay, like in titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2.

With this kind of gameplay, a lot could happen. Characters could remember what we did, places could change as we move through them, and some NPCs could even want revenge on us, like in the Nemesis System from Shadow of War.

It is hard not to think of two games that already have these features: Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA 5. GTA 6 is expected to go even bigger, with much more ambition and emergent gameplay.

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This does not mean Elsewhere wants to copy these games, or even beat them. It just wants to stand next to them, or at least find its own place in the genre they created.

This is also a change in direction for Activision, which is more used to linear experiences like Call of Duty. To find the company’s last true open-world game, we have to go back to 2012, when it released Prototype 2.

As more information about the project becomes available, we’ll make sure to let you guys know here at MP1st.

In other Activision news, the company is taking over development of the next mainline Halo game, with company leadership stating their goal is to build the “greatest Halo game ever.”

We also reviewed the campaign of Modern Warfare 4, and to our surprise, it might be one of the best COD campaigns of all time.

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