Moon Rover aims to explore new frontiers in emergent games
As the name implies, the newly established studio Moon Rover Games is looking to map out uncharted territory.
With a founding team of developers who worked on franchises like Far Cry, Battlefield, and Crusader Kings, Moon Rover wants to build on their experience with emergent gameplay and use it to do something new in a type of game defined by its ability to turn out novel results.
"There's something around emergent game experiences, a slight loss of control around the way the game works that I just really love," Moon Rover creative director Jamie Keen tells GamesIndustry.biz.
"There's this kind of joy you see within players when they get to experience this stuff, when they get a system that feels like it has a life of its own. That's something we really want to push forward with.
"We're taking a leap out of the anecdote generator that was Far Cry, and the [emergent] moments that punctuate through Battlefield. We want to do the same sort of thing, find our own recipe and move the design and paradigm on a bit if we possibly can."
Keen says Far Cry and Battlefield are "pretty intertwined in terms of the possibility space you can get to," saying that he hopes to take the best of the story and playful sandbox aspects of those games and put them together in a multiplayer co-op action experience.
And while he has high praise for the emergent qualities of a game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (in which new clips of what's possible with the game's various mechanics seem to make the rounds on social media regularly even six years after launch), he says Moon Rover isn't aiming for something quite that vast.
"This will be a more contained versions of things," he explains. "We want this sense of direction and
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