London Studio (a Sony Interactive Entertainment subsidiary), which has generally developed games supporting PlayStation console accessories (such as EyeToy and PlayStation VR), has gone one step further with an online co-op fighting game set in a fantasy London.

The team is developing for PlayStation 5, and in an interview with Gamesindustry, Stuart Whyte and Tara Saunders, two of the co-heads of London Studio, revealed more about the project. “We are proud of the history and innovation we’ve done over the years, supporting all sorts of PlayStation technology, whether virtual reality, augmented reality, microphones, or whatever.

With this project, we wanted to explore new avenues and set ourselves some unique challenges. We wanted to try something a little bit different, and this new project channels our ‘brave’ value and allows us to push ourselves on the ‘curious’ front. It’s an exciting future. It is. Innovation is always going to be at the heart of what we do. If you look at our heritage and the titles we’ve done, there are a lot of firsts in there. And that will continue,” said Whyte.

Saunders added that it is their most ambitious game to date. “We’ll take all that innovation DNA and apply that into this online co-op combat game. [In our concept art], you’re seeing a take on a modern fantasy London. Our overarching theme is about bringing fantastical and magical elements and intersecting that with familiar worlds, and you don’t get much more familiar to us than London.” According to Whyte, they had several ideas over a few months and fine-tuned them until only a few remained (a design process inspired by Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn). The studio then spoke to several PlayStation teams while also communicating internally about which projects they were passionate about.

The game is being developed on their proprietary engine, the Soho Engine, for PlayStation 5. It is designed for this console. They also involved US and UK gamers in the concept survey: “This concept scored super high in all areas. Through an anonymous poll, we polled hundreds of gamers in the UK and US with some of the shortlisted ideas… This was the one that came up top. Our Soho Engine, our in-house game engine, is at the heart of what we’re doing here. This engine was built from the ground up for this generation of hardware and the needs of the game we’re making. It’s designed to take full advantage of the PlayStation 5. But it’s fair to say that some of the toolsets we’re using date back to the VR Worlds and Blood & Truth tech we had on PlayStation 4. Because at the end of the day, virtual reality games need to have super-efficient pipelines and engines,” added Whyte.

Remember the Sony leak (which we reported on)? At the bottom of the list was the code name of the London studio’s project, Camden. It could be a live service game for PlayStation 5 AND PC. As it’s officially dubbed as online and co-op, it’s safe to say: the leak wasn’t wrong in this case!

Source: Gematsu