Mavericks: Proving Grounds Is "Basically 2,000 Call of Duty Maps In One"

Other battle royale games might be big, but Mavericks: Proving Grounds is taking the genre to new heights with an ambitious 1,000-player battle.

Automaton is the team that's building the world of Mavericks: Proving Grounds and plans to support that many players in every battle royale match. While the game is indeed a battle royale title like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Automaton CEO James Thompson spoke to VG247 to say that it's more than that.

"The quickest way to describe Mavericks is to say that it's a battle royale – but we really see it as a massively multiplayer PVP experience," Thomson told VG247. "It's really approaching the genre in a very different way to anything that's come out on the market in this genre recently, though – it's been built from the ground up with an MMO architecture, with SpatialOS as the infrastructure and server side of that."

In order to fit so many players in each game, the map itself has to be large enough to accommodate everyone. The map that's been teased for Mavericks is a fitting size that incorporates these MMO and PvP elements with the devs saying that it's a "16km sq playable area with a capital in the center – a social hub." The location of the proving grounds is modeled after the countryside of Northern England with Thompson saying that it'll be both intuitive and destructible.

As far as filling that world with a level design to fit so many players, Thompson referenced Call of Duty when discussing their approach to level design.

"We're basically 2,000 Call of Duty maps in one, so we're not going to be spoke-make entirely every single piece of the map, but we do give that impression because we do much more with modular sets that build up that level design."

Comparisons were also drawn to Rainbow Six Siege with Thompson saying that the buildings in Mavericks will be just as destructible as those in the Tom Clancy game. Instead of just busting down walls and structures without strategy to get to their goal in other battle royale games, he said that penetrating these defenses is "a big deal" in Mavericks.

"Sieging a house is a big deal in Mavericks, where it's an afterthought in what you might see on the market today. We think about each of these components as pretty substantial pieces of level design, and so to make sure that all these pieces are adding up to fun, so we're really thinking about level design. Current battle royale games… they don't really go there yet. They're fun, but they're about the players and are set against pretty basic backdrops. Obviously Fortnite is a different approach since you can build stuff, but still."

Mavericks: Proving Grounds was previewed in the trailer above and does not have a release date yet.