Shroud, legendary esports competitor and popular streamer, has announced that he’s making an AAA open-world survival shooter. He isn’t alone – he’s partnering with British development studio, Splash Damage, and content creator, Sacriel, to achieve this. For years, Shroud has ranked at the top of the charts as one of the most-followed streamers on Twitch, and for most of that time, he’s been known to play shooters. Now, he wants to make his own.
This grand effort unites Shoud, Sacriel, and Splash Damage, with the two streamers coming on board as ‘Executive Creators’. Reportedly, great minds are being united, with Sacriel and Shroud bringing years of first-hand gaming expertise and creativity into the Splash Damage studio. However, this is a developer that has worked hard to make a name for itself in the business and has been attached to a wide range of projects that stretch back more than twenty years.
Shroud, Sacriel, and Splash Damage Have Teamed Up
Splash Damage has some serious game-building chops, boasting more than four hundred employees and two decades of history. Since it was formed in 2001, the studio has lent its technical talents to the likes of Brink, Batman: Arkham Origins, Gears of War: UE, and the multiplayer offerings for Gears of War 5 and Gears 5. Recently, the studio revealed it was working on Transformers: Reactivate, an all-new game.
However, taking on this project with Shroud and Sacriel is a brand-new venture, as it’ll see the studio essentially create its first open-world adventure. In this unannounced and unnamed project, Shroud and Sacriel quite simply want to build the best open-world survival shooter ever, which was a theme mirrored by Shroud in a positive statement he gave on the partnership:
‘This project means everything to me. Chris (Sacriel) and I have refined a vision for what’s next in the survival genre and with Splash Damage we’re setting out to build it. We want to build the best survival game ever, and with Sacriel’s brain and Splash Damage’s team, I know we can do it.’
Shroud, a ten-year esports veteran of both the CSGO and VALORANT verticals, is one of the most-followed streamers on Twitch. He has more than ten million followers – and more than six million on YouTube. On the other side, British streamer, Sacriel, boasts a combined following of more than one million users. They know a thing or two about games, and quite often, they’ve enjoyed survival shooters on their streams.
In recent months and years, both of these streamers have found themselves playing Escape From Tarkov, PUBG, DayZ, and Rust – all great examples of the type of thing they might want to build with Splash Damage.
What Will Shroud’s Game Be Like?
For now, there’s no indication of what Shroud’s game will be like. For the most part, we know it’ll be an open-world survival shooter because that has been confirmed already, but at the moment, the game itself is in pre-production. As such, it’s liable to change at the drop of a hat, with the developers taking the opportunity at this stage to flesh out the game and all its concepts.
In the video posted above, Shroud explained that he wanted to look at equipping his game with realistic weapon handling. So, it makes sense that he and Sacriel could be leaning towards an Escape From Tarkov-style model, which boasts more realistic weapon physics than any other game mentioned. Could Sacriel, Shroud, and Splash Damage be about to build some kind of fusion between the open-world survival model and the extraction shooter genre? It’s highly likely.