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Big Bang Theory

Edge

June 2017

Could SpatialOS bring about the next generation of online play?

The name Improbable is either the best moniker for the company making SpatialOS, or the worst. It’s a name that plays on this revolutionary new tool’s expectation-busting nature, since it’s a networking technology that has the potential to transform online games. It can realise huge, richly complex virtual worlds that can exist and change without their players’ input – and not just for large studios with enormous budgets. In short, it could democratise a powerful new vision for networked games and bring about the next generation of online play.

Its nature as a networked set of game engines working in parallel is hard to grasp, and it makes big promises. Huge and persistent online worlds that will be free of many of the traditional restrictions of online play? It sounds too good to be true. That’s why Improbable, which is headquartered in London and has 170 employees, has opened SpatialOS up for developers to play around with. “It’s our hope that it’s developers building great games on top of our platform that will demonstrate what’s possible,” says Herman Narula, Improbable CEO and co-founder. And as well as getting them to communicate it, they’re also helping Improbable refine and stress-test SpatialOS, as well as explore what new features it should include.

The fruits of these developers’ work have just started to come to light, though we first outlined Improbable’s headliner, Bossa Studios’ fabulously ambitious physics sandbox game