Former BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn confirmed via Twitter that the official reveal of his new game will happen tomorrow at The Game Awards 2021.
Very excited to share that we’ll be revealing our game at #TheGameAwards this week! I can’t believe this is actually happening…
— Aaryn Flynn (@AarynFlynn) December 6, 2021
Aaryn Flynn left BioWare in July 2017, when Casey Hudson came back to the company to take his mantle. Flynn had worked at the company for seventeen years on legendary roleplaying games like Baldur’s Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, and Mass Effect 2 to name a few.
A bit over a year later, he officially joined Improbable, the cloud computing firm behind SpatialOS, the distributed networking engine. Flynn was reportedly impressed by SpatialOS and wanted to find applications for it that would lead to bigger, more persistent and more complex game world simulations.
In March 2019, Aaryn Flynn became the General Manager of Improbable’s new Edmonton-based internal game development studio. Later that year, during the Reboot Develop Red conference in Banff, Alberta, our Canadian editor Nathan Birch got to meet with the man to learn a bit more about the studio’s first game, an online RPG powered by SpatialOS.
On that topic, while remaining tight-lipped, he said:
It brings some of the classic things like scale and deeper simulation. The simulation thing is interesting, because we can do things we otherwise couldn’t. Every online RPG has been constrained to a single “box” if you will, or it’s required an enormous amount of bespoke engineering to make it work over multiple boxes, but now with SpatialOS we have a technology that provides that for us. So now our developers get to have fun and do some thinking about what makes a great online RPG experience. And we don’t have all the answers yet — we’re still trying things on and experimenting, but simulation is definitely cool.
Aaryn Flynn, a programmer on Neverwinter Nights, also didn’t hide that some inspiration may be coming from that title and what today’s technology (chiefly SpatialOS) could enable developers to do in such a game.
That’s certainly well worth our interest, so we’ll be tuning in at the TGA 2021 to report on this game reveal.