When it comes to battle royale games, 100 players seems to be the sweet spot for the biggest titles out there. Fortnite and PUBG both aim to match 100 players together, and that usually makes for a nice distribution of players about the map. Mavericks Proving Grounds is aiming for 400 players during squad match-ups. From both a gameplay and technical standpoint, this seems super ambitious and hard to imagine resulting in anything but chaos.
James Thompson, CEO at Automaton, spoke with Wccftech during last weekend’s PC Gamer Weekender. The interview was lengthy, and so I’ve selected some highlights to share with you.
First up, Thompson is calling Mavericks Proving Grounds an “evolution” of what we’ve seen from current battle royale titles:
It’s a massive multiplayer online shooter and it’s sort of an evolution to what we’ve seen recently of Battle Royale, with much more world simulation and focus on building a large world, while still in a tactical and high fidelity environment. It will also incorporate MMO features such as a persistent social hub and progression systems, so there’s quite a lot packed into this product.
400 players isn’t the limit, Thompson confirms, and that figure isn’t final:
We can support more than four hundred players, though the goal here for us is what makes a great compelling session of thirty – forty minutes of gameplay. If you are playing in a squad, there would be four of you, so there will four hundred players in total, if you are playing solo it’s actually just one hundred…
Yes, Mavericks Proving Grounds PS4 and Xbox One are going to happen. At least, that’s what Thompson is aiming for!
Yes. We don’t have a definitive date for console launch. We are launching in Q4 this year on PC, and we are aiming to do a console launch as soon as we can … At the moment we are targeting Xbox One and PS4 upwards.
I mean, Mavericks Proving Grounds certainly sounds impressive. However, as we’ve only seen a teaser trailer and a few screenshots, it’s pretty difficult to take anything that Thompson says seriously. With that said, I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong, and a smooth, stable 400-player experience would definitely blow my mind.
Thompson certainly sounds sure of himself, and I’m hoping that confidence carries through all the way to release and beyond. Post-launch support has proven huge for the bigger battle royale titles, and I feel it’s one of the reasons that Fortnite has started to create a bigger buzz than PUBG. Hopefully Mavericks Proving Grounds employs a similar approach, with transparency maintained all the way through development.
