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At a tumultuous time for the games industry, a melting pot of experienced devs from studios like Bethesda, Ubisoft, and Capybara Games have co-founded a new studio, Soft Rains, including studio head Joel Burgess, game director Matt Scott, technical director Jules Glegg, narrative director Kaitlin Tremblay, and world director Daryl Brigner.
Between them, the team has worked on games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 (and 4, and 76), Valorant, A Mortician's Tale, and the un-put-downable Grindstone. Soft Rains' debut game is a first-person sci-fi adventure built in Unreal Engine 5, and former Skyrim, Fallout, Grindstone, and Watch Dogs: Legion dev Burgess says he doesn't "feel too bashful about seeing some of the DNA of stuff that we've worked on before." That said, this is "not a spiritual successor" to their previous games, Burgess stresses, so don't expect Soft Rains to make "a little Skyrim."
"We didn't grow beyond our means"
Soft Rains started to come together toward the end of 2022, "but we've kept our noses down a bit," Burgess tells us at GDC 2025. "There was the opportunity where folks were in their careers, and it's a bit of a disparate group of people that either wanted to work together again or were hoping to work together and find that opportunity."
We want everybody to be able to see their thumbprints on the clay of the game
Joel Burgess
The industry has seen extreme ups and downs in the past four years, and Burgess says Soft Rains worked to be informed by the goings on, but not defined by them. "There's always weather outside of your window," he reasons. "We've striven to not be overly defined by the circumstances. Starting at the end of 2022, there was a certain type of game and a certain type of studio that we were supposed to be. If we followed all the advice, and lots of really good advice from smart, well-meaning people, that we should be making games of a certain buzzword technology or making something of bigger size or bigger scale, 'you'll be able to fundraise this' or 'you better do that.' We really wanted to make something that suited who we were as individuals and who we were becoming as a team.
"Now that we've been at it for a couple of years building the game and getting to know each other and find our workflow, it is kind of the same thing again. Yeah, we're in this moment where things feel really volatile, and advice we got out of the sense that the opportunity is there, we're getting advice now that is the opposite ... What served us well then is serving us well now. We didn't grow beyond our means, and we really embraced workflows that we learned working at other studios, on indie stuff and AAA stuff. Be efficient, know how to make the kind of content we make really well while leaving space for things that we thought are creative or risky experimentally."
Some ex-AAA devs have said they never want to go back to the scale of AAA. Burgess, who's worked on very small and very large teams, says he has nothing against AAA and was "very, very happy" in some of those roles. Instead, he talks about the type of team Soft Rains is building and how that informs their game, and size is just one factor there. The focus is on clear and meaningful individual input. "The stuff where I was personally most gratified was environments of different scales where – I use this metaphor that we talk about – we want everybody to be able to see their thumbprints on the clay of the game when they step away from it," Burgess says. Scale is important here, but so is collaboration and communication. "This is a game that exists because of this team."
Burgess points to his experience as Skyrim level designer, where he was part of a team of around 95 people at its peak. "Stuff got built because somebody cared about building it," he says. "We knew it was a big game, we knew how to proceed forward, and we created an environment in that game where you had the opportunity to make a difference on the game if you saw a way for you to do it, if you were able to use the tools and get it in and get the right collaboration. That was a 100-person team, a big AAA game, but it's also true of when I was working with my friends at Capybara on much smaller things in a classically creative indie sort of environment. I don't think there's necessarily an optimal team size; I think it depends on the team."
"The game we're making is not a spiritual successor to X"
The dynamic and scope of Soft Rains' debut title has shaped its team. So what is it? They've prototyped and pitched and play tested a first-person sci-fi adventure, and Burgess – who seems horrified by the realization that he is an executive now after getting into game dev by "modding Duke Nukem 3D in my bedroom in my mom's house" – says it's got "some good action" and "good, crunchy mechanics." He describes it as "tender," and "really earnest in a way that I'm extremely excited about."
I don't want to be trying to make things that recapture some previous former glory
Joel Burgess
"[It's] really informed by stuff that we love, ranging from classic immersive sim games, like in the work we love from Arkane on Prey or Dishonored," he continues. "Things we think are really interesting that feel like they could only exist now, like Hardspace: Shipbreaker." There's a bit of Mortician's Tale in there, with everyone wanting to "really bring the best of what you've done before." There was a focus on agile testing and ideation that avoided heavy R&D – build quickly, get it in-engine fast, and play the game together regularly to "see what's working out."
The team hit on sci-fi pretty early on, with a vision of topicality over nostalgia. "What a lot of great sci-fi and speculative fiction does at the time is speak to the anxieties and concerns that were contemporaneous in those times," he says. "Doing science fiction that felt like it could be contemporaneous to our time felt like it could be pretty unique for us."
"It's really informed by stuff that we love and stuff that we've worked on before," he adds. This balance of what the team has done, what they want to do, and what people are likely to expect from a team of their background comes up several times in our conversation. A feature building on Burgess' Bethesda work was thrown out after prototyping, for example, while another early idea developed into a "core, pillar mechanic." Burgess says "I don't feel too bashful about seeing some of the DNA of stuff that we've worked on before," but at the same time, "I don't want to trade on nostalgia too much ... I don't want to be trying to make things that recapture some previous former glory."
"With my resume, with the resumes of some of my peers on the team, we go into a room with an investor or a publisher or whatever, and there is an expectation we're gonna make a little Skyrim," he says. "That can be heavily leveraged in marketing and pitching and going for investment, but is that interesting? This is maybe selfish, but as a creative person, there are things about stuff I've worked on before that I would love to recapture, but it's often the team dynamic or where my life was at the time.
"I think players will see elements of things that we've worked on, but I think I can say this definitively, the game we're making is not a spiritual successor to X. This is not the story of so and so's studio making a game X killer. It's not that. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, right? There's stuff that we are good at, and contributions we made to those games that are very individualistic within the context of those teams, and it would be unfun and foolish not to use our strengths to challenge our weaknesses."
