WHEN I was sent to Build A Rocket Boy’s Edinburgh studio in early March, it was because of one thing: my editor wanted to know what Leslie Benzies was getting up to.
Leslie Benzies is a minor superstar in the UK games industry, having led the development of the Grand Theft Auto series from its third to its fifth installation, including the still popular GTA Online.
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Since 2016 Benzies has been working away with his newly founded studio, Build A Rocket Boy, and they’ve been cooking up Everywhere.
Only, it wasn’t until Gamescom 2022 that we knew what Everywhere even looked like.
Benzies’ post-Rockstar success even landed him at number 21 in the Telegraph’s Tech Hot 100 list in 2020.
Needless to say, expectations are high for Everywhere, and now there’s another title to factor in: MindsEye.
Everywhere, and its potential, took centre stage during the studio visit. Everywhere isn’t a game, necessarily, nor is it a creation tool, or a social hub.
It’s intended to be all of those things.
The “stylised realism” of the visuals evokes Fortnite, while the creative potential, on paper, sounds a lot like Roblox. That’s an easy summation to make, though it’s not entirely fair.
A demonstration of Everywhere clears things up considerably.
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First up are the creative tools – called ARC-adia, which is used to create ARCs, the experiences.
Players can select from a huge library of pre-made assets, and those assets can be duplicated, sized up, attached to other objects, and those groups can be replicated, and so on.
It’s a seamless process, allowing players to quickly create a test bed without ever touching a line of code.
But on top of base assets, entire gameplay mechanics can be borrowed and implemented.
The team showed us racing, shooting mechanics, and some basic platforming, all of which culminated in a final boss showdown with a giant scorpion.
It’s all an example of what a player can create, or borrow from, when creating their own stages and challenges.
It’s reminiscent of PlayStation’s Dreams, but the social hub might be what closes the deal.
The world of Everywhere is large, with multiple biomes, though we didn’t get to peek at those too much.
Instead the central city of Utopia acts as a hub for players to explore with their friends and meet other players before jumping into a variety of games, either created by Build A Rocket Boy internally, or by other users.
When it comes to custom experiences built by the studio itself, MindsEye is the showpiece. This is quite literally the reason most people pay attention to Everywhere.
It appears to be a triple-A quality story, complete with cinematic cutscenes and professional performance capture, with some driving, shooting, explosions along the way.
It’s the part of Everywhere that’s most similar to what people expect from the former lead developer of Grand Theft Auto.
We’re told that everything in MindsEye can be created within Everywhere, as long as the developers are talented enough.
Likewise, everything within MindsEye can be used within Everywhere’s asset library, so, if you are ambitious and talented enough, you could make a pseudo-sequel, or simply utilise those assets in your own ARC.
In essence, Build A Rocket Boy acts as a middle-man, allowing you to create and share easily thanks to its tools.
But of course, it’ll be exclusive to their platform, and only playable within Everywhere.
You’d most certainly get more ownership of your work and more out of your tools if you just learn to develop in Unreal Engine 5, the base for Everywhere, but it won’t be as easy as plucking pre-made cars and driving mechanics for a race track you’ve built in Everywhere’s game world.
But that’s not to say that Everywhere’s tools aren’t robust.
During the tour of Build A Rocket Boy’s Edinburgh studio we were shown how the cinematics team crafts cutscenes and refines performance capture.
In the audio studio we were given a demonstration of how spatial sound in Everywhere works, and how this will apply to player creations without additional input.
Everywhere promises so much. Just, so, so much. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming.
We have a creation tool, a platform for those creations, and a triple-A experience wrapped up inside it all.
It aptly demonstrates that Everywhere, and Mindseye, has incredible potential.
The question is, how long will it take for players to tap into that potential, and will it really be able to compete in a market with a shrinking attention span?
We’ll find out when Everywhere becomes playable in 2023 on PC.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
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