Improbable start in-house development led by former BioWare head

Improbable, the networking boffins most recently known for their public spat with Unity, are getting directly into games development. While they've previously produced some tech-demos such as Survival, it was a means to an end to sell their SpatialOS technology to other studios.  Now they're opening up two studios. The first is in Edmonton, Canada, and led by former BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn. The second studio, based in London, England, will be led by former Call Of Duty producer John Wasilczyk. Not bad, but it'll be down to what kind of teams they build.

So far, Improbable have only announced the studio heads, rather than any of the actual development talent. While directorial input can sometimes make or break a game, it's the individual coders, artists, writers and systems designers that take a game from the concept stages to launch. Aaryn Flynn will be appearing at GDC 2019 to talk more about his first game with this new studio, currently codenamed 'Project Edmonton'. Clearly, their project names division could use talent, as on top of telling us nothing, it's ferociously boring.

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Improbable's dev teams are still hiring, currently looking for engineering, art, design and QA people, so it sounds like it'll be a while until they're fully up to speed. This being Improbable, they've announced that their games will be online and using SpatialOS technology. Again, only the most boring of technical details, but it does largely rule out an off-brand Dragon Age. A spiritual successor to Star Wars: The Old Republic is a little more plausible, but that's just wishful thinking on my part. Whatever they make, it seems a good bet there'll be lots of players crammed into a single active instance.

Improbable and Aaryn Flynn will be talking more about 'Project Edmonton' at GDC 2019 later this month. The conference runs from the 18th to 22nd of March.