Denis Dyack, the man behind successes like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes as well as the underwhelming Too Human, is betting heavily on interactive streaming with his next game, Deadhaus Sonata, a free-to-play online cooperative action RPG.
In our recent interview, Dyack highlighted how the interactive streaming technology powered by Genvid will allow folks who don’t even have the game to meaningfully interact with the ongoing sessions through streaming. When we asked about his thoughts on next-gen hardware such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, he said the technological leaps enabled by these two upcoming consoles are surely impressive, but he believes interactive streaming to offer a much more provocative opportunity by comparison that gamers should be ‘very excited about’.
I think the technology is really cool. However, just to be clear, we tend to focus on things that aren’t necessarily platform driven. If you look at cloud first, what that means is the hardware is less important, how you deliver your stuff is more important. I think next-gen is going to be awesome, it’s going to allow us to do some fantastic technology. Once you’re playing on that particular console, I think the technological leaps are truly impressive for sure. However, focusing on the cloud and allowing people to play cross-platform, allowing the game to be free to play, making sure we maintain ethical models and that we can tell stories in a persistent universe for Deadhaus Sonata, that’s all stuff that is beyond the specific console itself, and more up towards the technologies that we’re looking at. The same, of course, with the interactive streaming tech powered by Genvid, which works on all consoles now. That’s where we think the future is. There’s no gateway to what we’re doing here. Anyone who can stream can also interact. And I think that’s a huge future, we don’t know what it means to be able to play a game that you don’t even have just by connecting to a stream. These are all new things that we’re going to start to be able to explore, I think they’re as exciting as all the new graphics and all the technologies coming out are, in fact, I think these are much more provocative opportunities that gamers should be very excited about.
Deadhaus Sonata is expected to debut later this year on PC via Steam Early Access, though Dyack said the game could get a simultaneous console release, too.
