What is Everywhere? The developer of Build A Rocket Boy kept everything a secret, not showing anything about the game, except for the trailer at the opening of Gamescom, which made people realize that it could potentially be. There was little information: it was headed by legendary Rockstar producer Leslie Benzis, and it was extensive science fiction. That’s probably all the information.
Now, after a trip to Scotland, where an NME representative has had enough of Tunnocks products, we can finally tell you not everything about Everywhere, but a huge amount of information about what you can expect from the mysterious title.
So, we tear off the patch. Everywhere is a platform for user—generated content. Sometimes it’s a shooting game, a racing game and even a platformer. It’s also a powerful set for creativity, the game has an editor that will allow people to create levels, resource groups, or even cool things like traps or bosses that other players can buy in the in-game store to use in their own creations.
This sci-fi panorama? This is Utropia, the main social space that links together the various areas that make up the experience of Everywhere, and it is here that players will wander in the game between play, exploration and creativity.
Pretty much everything else you’ll see in Everywhere will be user generated content (UGC), dubbed ARC. This will be created in the game creation tools dubbed ARC-adia, a play on words that immediately makes me think about what was named first: the editor or the content packages.
Oddly enough, the pure sci-fi aesthetic deprives the game of many characters, and the editor, or at least the sections that were shown to us, seem completely devoid of individuality. You can fight in a chemical plant, race through the desert, or even destroy enemies in close combat to the death, but everything will still look like everywhere else. This can create one of the biggest problems in the game: you can create anywhere in Anywhere, but it will all look like somewhere else.
At these ARC levels, players can drop portals that will take them to other ARCS, which means it’s easy for people to explore new content and disappear down the rabbit hole. This system strangely resembles Habbo Hotel, but here it can mean that you direct people from your gaming house, say, to explore a platformer level you created or join a race on a track that you created yourself. built.
All this is a bit like “Get ready for the First Player,” although Benzis himself admits that the team is actively trying to distance itself from the terrible label of the metaverse. Similarly, the BARB team seeks to state that the game has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain, cryptocurrency or NFT — a rumor that seems to have emerged out of nowhere and woven into the mystery of Everywhere.
This is a very cool presentation. Watching the game progress in real time, the team introduces us to the basics of shooting, driving and creativity. The game, according to Benzis, is very close to launch, and proof of this is a demonstration from assistant game director Adam Whiting, in which he guides us through training and some initial levels, even jumping into ARC-adia to create in real time.
Although I haven’t played, watching Whiting’s game, you can see a game that looks solid: the shooting looks pretty arcade-like, and the movement seems to empower players, with a number of smooth and responsive crawling abilities.
It’s hard to say if the races we see are good, although we are shown several different cars that players can customize and race. If there is something that I saw while watching “Everywhere”, then the most disappointing thing for me is that I can’t take it on myself and see if it’s as pleasant to play as it looks in motion.
Divided into small groups, the journalists went to the office of the developer Build A Rocket Boy and showed “Everywhere” more than anyone has ever seen. I keep hearing one thing: this is the biggest project we’ve ever worked on. I believe that, in addition to the employee who chuckled, saying that putting it all together was a “fucking nightmare.”
We were shown a lot of incredible concept art and an audio system that can block the atmosphere with ray tracing, which looks really impressive.
There is a lot of potential here, but I’m not sure that Everywhere is impressive enough to have an impact on an already heavily colonized space. Yesterday (March 22), the day before publication, Epic Games added the Unreal Engine to Fortnite, which is likely to completely change the way user-generated content works, offering powerful tools to create a huge Fortnite audience. Elsewhere, Roblox already has a huge group of young fans who have already invested in the platform.
The BARB office in Edinburgh is a vibrant open space that used to be a casino, but I’m willing to bet that Everywhere is the biggest game this building has ever seen. It looks like the key to this success could be MindsEye and getting people to take Everywhere into their own hands to try it out for themselves.
From there, and with a few community superstars doing things that will do things that will attract an audience to play them, and “Everywhere” could be a hit, but that fight is going to be tough. There’s definitely something everywhere, I’m just not sure if it’s enough to compete in a space where there are already two monolithic competitors. I am cautiously optimistic, but I really want to see more “Everywhere”.
Everywhere will be released later in 2023.
