Swedish studio Avalanche Studios has made a name for itself in the industry as one of the premier open-world game developers. Most recently it gave the world the Mad Max game, which despite not setting the world on fire commercially or critically, garnered a hardcore following. However, Avalanche Studios is most identifiable as the developer of the Just Cause series, an adored trilogy of games that truly embrace the freedom that the open-world formula has to offer.
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That said, it should come as no surprise that the developer’s new, unannounced game, is an open-world action game. This would have been one of the safest bets you could place. But what is a surprise is word that its next game will be a self-published title, a first for the developer. This also seemingly rules out the game being Just Cause 4, as that IP belongs to Square Enix.
Details on the game’s nature and publishing comes via a new job listing on the developer’s site that reads:
“At Avalanche Studios, we’re hard at work developing our next, as of yet unannounced, self-published title. We can’t say much about the game itself (or we’d have to kill you), but it will be created in true Avalanche Studios fashion and offer players tons of our trademark emergent, open-world action. In the game you will play as a young adult, whom we will bring to life using cutting-edge face scanning technology.”
As you can see, the listing notes the game will feature trademark, open-world action, and be created in “True Avalanche Studios fashion,” which seems to apply a large sandbox world that is highly interactable with.
It also notably reveals that in the game you play as a young adult, and that it will be using cutting-edge motion face scanning tech. The job listing continues:
“We are now looking for 12 adults, ages 18-25, to become the faces of our in-game characters. Not only will the 12 chosen ones have their likeness be visible in the game for years to come – played and enjoyed by gamers worldwide – but they will also get a chance to visit the studio. During the day, they’ll meet he development team, scan their faces, have lunch and fika (the latter is a cornerstone of the Swedish diet) and most importantly – get a bit of insight into how the magic of game development happens.”
The most interesting tidbit here is the “years to come part.” Whether this simply means the game’s legacy, or is a subtle hint that they plan for this game to be start of a new series, isn’t clear. The former is likely the case, but there is room in that statement for the latter to be true.
The 12 applicants chosen will notably not be brought into the studio until April, which seems to imply the game isn’t very far in development, but maybe the implication is misleading. The studio hasn’t shipped a game since December 2015 in the form of Just Cause 3, but it did aid in the development of The Hunter: Call of the Wild, which only released just last year. That all known, who knows how far along in development this mystery project is, or when we will learn more.
