This past March we got a look at Scavengers, a multiplayer PvPvE survival shooter where up to 20 teams of three players are tasked with surviving the elements, AI attacks, and potential fights with rival teams as they try to gather the most datapoints in the map and exfiltrate to win. If the load of talk about Improbable’s SpatialOS tech didn’t put you off from trying the game out, you’ll get your chance as the shooter is entering early access on April 28th.
While the game’s early access will be open to everyone on that date, those who are eager to get their hands on the game ahead of time can do so using Twitch Drops; it’s a matter of creating an Improbable account, linking it to a Twitch account, and watching any livestream of the game for at least 30 minutes to receive a Steam key. Broadcasts are set to start as early as 3:00 a.m. EDT, while the early access launch will be on both Steam and EGS.
Circling back to the subject of SpatialOS-powered multiplayer game scales, Scavengers has been doing some tinkering with a ScavLab mode, which could let as many as 9,000 human and AI players hang out on the same map at the same time. PC Gamer says it was part of a 1700-player battle that was pure chaos, as well as a battle that added nearly 8000 bots to the mix and still apparently held up. MMORPG players know what a difficult feat this is as several MMOs have been working on this type of tech for a long time. Dual Universe, for example, put 30,000 people and bots into an alpha map back in 2019; EVE Online holds the record for most participants in a video game PvP battle with 8,825 players (6,557 concurrent), while Camelot Unchained put over 5000 people and bots together back in 2019. Other ambitious goals, like Atlas’ plan to put 40,000 players on a single server, haven’t materialized. Suffice it to say that actually pulling off 9000 humans in a battle would be a major feat for gaming – and definitely one that would make this an MMO and not just a multiplayer shooter.
