Former Battlefield Studio Head Shares First Exciting Look At New Games

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Patrick Söderlund, the former CEO of Battlefield developer DICE, has shared the first exciting look at new games that his current studio Embark is working on. They already look much more promising than DICE’s Battlefield 5 has ever been, which is a good sign for Söderlund’s recently established independent studio.

From the very beginning, Battlefield 5 was a disappointment, which ended up with underdelivered promises, missing content, and abandoned support. While fans called on DICE to fix the game's issues and add more content, the studio ultimately abandoned the game, ending support for what seemed to many like an unfinished project this year.

Patrick Söderlund spent years with the Battlefield franchise from the very beginning of the series’ existence, and he only left EA in 2018. Shortly after that, he founded Embark with a group of industry veterans, and it is finally revealed what the studio has been working on for two years. With almost 200 employees, Embark has two distinctive projects in production. Both are shooters, which is understandable considering Söderlund’s expertise in curating Battlefield’s development for years. The first game is a third-person shooter judging by the short video clip. With this title, the studio’s intention is to mix genres and enrich them with ground-breaking technologies like procedural-aided generation and photogrammetry. This particular game has already entered the phase of external testing, although it is still early in development on Unreal Engine 4. The second project is a team-based first-person PVP shooter, from which just a few pieces of character concept art have been shared, as it is still being prototyped. Dynamic action and physics-based destruction lie at the core of this new game.

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While it seems like Embark Studios is moving in the right direction with its games powered by innovative technologies, DICE is not in a favorable spot right now. The Stockholm division is currently working on the next Battlefield, which could be the last game in the series if it underdelivers in the same fashion as Battlefield 5. DICE LA, on the other hand, has undergone a restructuring process supervised by Respawn’s CEO Vince Zampella. The studio has been rebranded and already has a new unannounced project in development.

With an emphasis on procedural generation, Embark Studios wants to focus on actual gameplay innovations rather than manual tasks that tend to take a lot of time. This could greatly benefit the overall quality of future projects. Judging by the tiny clip of the studio’s pioneering game, it is going to look gorgeous thanks to photogrammetry. The second concept of a team-based PVP FPS looks a bit risky, especially considering that it could be another hero shooter in an oversaturated market of similar projects, but it will nonetheless take advantage of new technical solutions. Whatever shape its projects take, it's clear that Embark is out to make something much different from Battlefield.