MindsEye looks like a flashy but somewhat generic third-person shooter techno thriller from the Xbox 360 era that recently escaped containment and is now coming out in just a few weeks. Two of the most notable things about it are its director, longtime Rockstar Games producer and Grand Theft Auto 5 lead designer Leslie Benzies, and just how exceptionally little fanfare there’s been around its impending launch. A third is that MindsEye will feature its own spin on Roblox-style user-generated content, which Benzies hopes will be a big part of the game’s decade-spanning growth plan.
“[The studio] will support the game through Play.MindsEye, with continuous new content,” he told GamesIndustry.biz, referring to the space where a stream of studio-made add-ons for the game will be hosted, not to be confused with Build.MindsEye, the toolset with which players will make their own new worlds and experiences.
This big interview comes less than two weeks out from MindsEye’s June 10 release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. “Some of the content, like races, are made just for fun. But [with] most of the content, we’ll try and incorporate it into the story. So once you’ve played the big overarching ten-year plan, you’ll have a very good idea of what this universe looks like.”
MindsEye was originally revealed as a spin-off to Everywhere, a mysterious MMO that aimed to be its own open-world metaverse of sorts with multiple biomes and multiplayer modes. That pitch helped Benzies’ Build A Rocket Boy studio raise nearly $40 million in funding but has since faded to the background as the team pivots to launching MindsEye as a conventional single-player $60 game in partnership with publisher IO Interactive, best known for the Hitman series.
But while the upcoming shooter about an ex-soldier suffering from memory loss in a fictional version of Las Vegas begins as a 20-hour linear campaign, post-launch updates and user-generated content are supposed to extend its life well into the future. It’s not clear how exactly, and Benzies is cagey about the details in his GamesIndustry.biz interview, but it sounds an awful lot like Roblox-style exploitation is part of the model.
“We have plans to add multiplayer, [and] we have plans to make a full open world,” he said. “And of course, we’ve also got to look at what players are creating, and incorporate that into our plans. Given the ease of the tools, we think there’s going to be a high percentage of players who will jump in and give it a pop, see how it feels. Hopefully some will create compelling content we can then promote and make that part of our plans to push to other players.”
I, too, hope “some will create compelling content,” and by “some” I mean the team at Build A Rocket Boy, which is selling a $60 game and a paid premium pass required to access some of the additional post-launch content. Elsewhere in the interview, Benzies talks about the spectrum of crafting in games, saying he hopes the building tools will be somewhere in the middle between Roblox (hard but expansive) and Minecraft (easy but simple). Epic recently announced it’s paid out over $300 million to people making stuff in Fortnite.
“The dream from the building side is to allow players the opportunity to create their own multiplayer open world games with ease,” Benzies told GamesIndustry.biz. “So anyone could pick up the game, jump in, drive around, stop at a point where they see something of interest, build a little mission, jump back in the car, drive again, build another mission. Once you’ve built a couple of hundred of these, you’ve built your own open world game. So, that’s the build side.”
Those are lofty goals for a brand-new game from a first-time studio. If the underlying game can deliver something solid, maybe there’s a chance, but if not, I don’t think the promise of user-generated content will be enough to bail MindsEye out.
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