Back To Life

How Darewise is bringing a sci-fi MMO by Viktor Antonov and Randy Smith to fruition

- 

For such a young company, Paris studio Darewise has already weathered a great deal of change. Founded only three years ago by two former Ubisoft producers, it set out as a publisher of midtier games – but after a rocky first game launch and finding itself facing yet another tectonic shift in the game industry, it’s gone all-out into in-house development. Its first game, Project C, is an MMO with production values worthy of a creative team led by Randy Smith, director of Thief: Deadly Shadows and founder of Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor developer Tiger Style (and previously an Edge columnist), and Viktor Antonov, visual designer behind Half-Life 2 and Dishonored. And it’s powered by Improbable’s future-facing multiplayer technology, SpatialOS, which promises to give all its players a single large,  deeply simulated and persistent sci-fi world to play within. In other words, Darewise is making one hell of a pivot.

Back in 2015, though, its founders, Benjamin Charbit and Vincent Marty, were riding on a principle that seemed cast-iron. Sandbox multiplayer successes such as Rust and