SCAVENGERS
Midwinter’s co-op survival shooter emerges from the storm
Developer Midwinter Entertainment
Publisher Improbable
Format PC
Origin US
Release 2021
Very few of us have come out of the maelstrom of the past year looking good. But Scavengers, a Halo Warzonestyle multiplayer showdown in which the frigid environment is just as much a threat as the other teams, is a rare exception: our latest hands-on reveals a game much improved from a promising, but also rather generic-looking, E3 2019 demo.
It’s been a year of growth all round for Scavengers and its makers, in a very literal sense. The team’s nearly doubled in size over the past year to a total of 45 people. “Our intention was always to build a much larger experience,” says Josh Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Midwinter Entertainment, and former studio head of 343 Industries. “We knew we had to build it slowly over time – both from a content standpoint with our team, but also in getting our systems to work at the larger player count. Because as you scale player count, you also scale AI count. So we have 60 players and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 400 to 500 active AI at any given time within a session.”