Former Rockstar North and Grand Theft Auto Boss, Leslie Benzies’ departure from the company has resulted in an ongoing lawsuit last year. Benzie is back this year with a new project. The working title Everywhere is Benzie’s new video game that is built on Amazon’s Lumberyard.
Benzie’s new working title has a long-term vision of having the capacity to develop and grow forever. In a press release, Benzie stated that the goal is to create a platform where players can entertain others and be entertained themselves. This new title will be blurring the lines between the simulated world and reality.
Benzie was the director of Grand Theft Auto Online, the massively lucrative online component of Grand Theft Auto 5. In the lawsuit that ensued following his departure from his former employer, Benzie states that the Houser brothers had little interest in GTA Online. The platform scale ambition of the game is enabled through the use of Lumberyard, Amazon’s AAA game engine which is deeply integrated with Amazon Web Services, including GameLift and Twitch.
Benzie states that Amazon’s cloud services and technologies provided them with the flexibility and power to create a new type of game that was never before possible for the massive gaming communities. Lumberyard’s cloud and client feature freed the developers to focus on creative and innovative elements of the game. Amazon has announced the free-to-use Lumberyard last February.
While the engine has no shared revenue requirement, Amazon hopes to profit from the online features like AWS and GameLift. Lumberyard is built on top of CryEngine which is renowned for its graphical fidelity. The studio behind Star Citizen which is a crowdfunding darling announced that they will be shifting to Lumbaryard from CryEngine as published by Polygon.
Another former GTA developer, Matthew Smith, is working on the new game. He states that the goal was to provide an enormous amount of freedom with just enough constraints and enough possibilities to keep the players constantly entertained. The players will feel that they are shaping the world around them and living in a genuinely alternate reality.
New offices in Edinburg, Scotland and Los Angeles, California in addition to the new Budapest studio, are also at work on the new game title. Benzie states that Everywhere will be totally different from GTA. However, there is no news on the new game’s release yet as reported by GameRant.
