Rare brings in Alien: Isolation lead designer as Everwild's new design director

Everwild has a new design director who is bringing in a surprising amount of horror chops to the colorful fantasy game.

Gary Napper announced his new position at Everwild developer Rare on his personal Twitter account, saying he's "looking forward to making some amazing things" with the studio. Napper's previous credits include working as lead designer on Alien: Isolation and at Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology studio Supermassive Games.

While the specifics of a design director's role change from company to company, they typically oversee translating the broader creative vision of a project into the specific mechanics and systems which players will interact with. In short, they're one of the most pivotal members of the entire team.

The fact that Everwild was first revealed in November 2019 and is now getting a new design director two years later would be surprising, if we didn't already know Rare had made some significant changes to the project after its initial unveiling. Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty previously said rumors about a full reboot for Everwild were "a little more extreme" than what really happened, and Microsoft isn't pushing the team to show more too soon.

"So I'll just say that we'll share more on Everwild when the team has got some cool stuff to show," Booty told Kinda Funny. "We know there's excitement and anticipation for it and we don't want to keep things hidden for too long, but it's just natural that a team's gonna go through some of that process."

See what other projects we're looking forward to from Xbox Game Studios and beyond with our guide to upcoming Xbox Series X games.