Former Battlefield boss shows off his studio's impressive new action game

The new sci-fi game coming from a studio built by an ex-EA and DICE boss is absurdly pretty, judging by this first, brief gameplay teaser.

Embark Studios still isn't ready to put a name or anything resembling a release window on its first project, though it is ready to show us a few quick scenes from an early version of the game. The nine-second teaser gives me the best kind of DICE Star Wars Battlefront vibes: retro sci-fi aesthetic, environments at a massive scale, and nearly photorealistic graphics, that sort of thing.

The game's original announcement framed it as "a cooperative free-to-play action game set in a distant future, about overcoming seemingly impossible odds by working together." The studio also revealed that it's now working on a second project, a PvP shooter that "leans heavily into team-based gameplay and puts dynamism, physicality, and destruction front and center". It lets you play as a samurai, judging by this concept art? 

If I was the samurai I'd be extremely pissed about the desperado bringing a pair of Japanese swords too. Katanas are my thing, pal. Stay in your damn lane.

Embark Studios was founded in 2018 by Patrick Söderlund, the former executive vice president of Worldwide Studios at EA - and before that the CEO then general manager of DICE from 2000 to 2010. Embark started small, but according to this latest update it already consists of more than 200 employees. Ideally its output will seem like that of an even larger company - the blog post outlines how Embark is building procedural tools that cut down on how much time and resources developers need to spend making assets for modern, big-budget games.

Embark plans to share more about its approach to making content for games in the coming weeks, so hopefully we won't need to wait much longer to hear about its pair of projects.

See what else we're looking forward to in our big list of upcoming games.