Everywhere left me with a lot of questions. As I noted inmy preview, Build A Rocket Boy’s upcoming virtual platform aims to take on the likes ofFortniteandRobloxwith its own spin on what video games are capable of. It stubbornly refuses to be labeled as a metaverse, despite presenting many of the hallmarks similar products in the past have proudly boasted. It hopes to become a place for games, music, movies, communication, and creativity in ways that usurp our traditional descriptors for the medium. As our tour of Leslie Benzies’ lavish Edinburgh studio comes to an end, me and a handful of other media are all given a chance to ask the Rockstar North alumni questions about where this is going.
“What we’ve always found interesting is when you give people tools, and you think they will create this with it, and they find interesting ways to do [something else],” Benzies says about Everywhere’s creation tools, which will work similarly to a number of other games on the market. You make your own levels, items, and mechanics before sharing them with the community, and if Build A Rocket Boy loves your work, it can share it with the world.
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“It’s a term,” Benzies says with a laugh after being asked about his comfort with the word ‘metaverse’. “[Metaverses] are a lot of things to a lot of different people. I have seen tiny little mobile games, and they’re like, ‘Oh and this is a metaverse!’ We don’t really call ourselves a metaverse, and games have been metaverses for a long time with that definition, and we attempt to shy away from it.”
Similar modern terms like the blockchain and NFTs are also ideas the studio has fallen foul to in recent years, with its initial reveal at Gamescom 2021 immediately being met with huge accusations of it identifying as some form of crypto racket. Build A Rocket Boy was hiring for a researcher in the field at the time, so I think wires were crossed, and the internet did what it does best - jump to conclusions. “You could have released anything a year ago, you could have invented a new cereal, and it would have been somehow related to the metaverse or cryptocurrency, so I just think it was unfortunate timing because I don’t know what we did to make that happen or for that to be reported on.” But Benzies also admits that six long years of quiet development followed suddenly with an uproar of information “set ourselves up for people to fill in the blanks, because we didn’t feel ready to talk.”
So Everywhere isn’t a metaverse, a crypto racket, or a new brand of cereal. But what is it? A lot of things, and primarily a platform for users to create and share content with one another while jumping into curated experiences created by Build A Rocket Boy. At the centre of this is MindsEye, a cinematic blockbuster adventure available exclusively within the confines of Everywhere. I’m still not entirely sure what its deal is, and Benzies’ attempts to describe its ambitions only muddy the waters further. It’s pitched as both an independent narrative idea and a further expansion of Everywhere’s suite of creative tools, and it’s hard to tell right now how its episodic approach will shape out or how we’ll even gain access to it.
“With MindsEye we have a bunch of episodes planned and we all know what we’re going to do with it,” Benzies explains. “But we always see Everywhere as belonging to players. We think we know what they want to do, but we’ve got no idea. Let’s face it. You never know the direction, also the way the world is now. The world of video games especially is changing at such a pace that it’s incredibly hard to keep up. So I think what we need to do is provide our players with the tools and allow them to take it in certain directions. I heard something quite interesting about TikTok and how it has 99 types of viewers, and that’s where these things are going. You always thought of gamers as having one trajectory and okay that’s where we’re going to go - it’s not. We need to start breaking this up into lots of different players.
“We’ve kind of done that [with Everywhere] in we’ve got builders, we’ve got shooters, we’ve got racers, these different cohorts, but they’re all going to split up into endless varieties of different types of people. I know we can’t give each of those a bespoke experience, we have to give that group, that community, the tools to build the experiences that they want.”
MindsEye, however, is a bespoke experience, or so I thought until Benzies broke down how its future episodic structure will work. Primarily, it seems to serve as an expansion to all that Everywhere hopes to achieve instead of existing alongside it. “Each of the episodes will be a different type of gameplay. We’re very cutscene heavy, that’s a lot of work. Our next episode will introduce multiplayer so it won’t be as cutscene heavy. It will be a more replayable game, playable with each other in co-op and stuff like that. Each episode is different because we think we need that content. There are two types of players - some like living in a real world and some like living in a fantasy world. We want to give them both of those styles.”
Benzies stresses that while MindsEye will have an overarching narrative and similar tenets across all the episodes, it will also take place across multiple different time periods while giving the development team freedom to experiment and reflect on how its audience comes to receive each instalment. He talks about wanting Build A Rocket Boy to avoid becoming a sequel company where it makes the same games again and again except they look and play better than before, and how trying something new all the time is an exciting way to express its creativity. I agree, but the bedrock being discussed here needs to be something before it can ever think about broaching such expansion. MindsEye and its gameplay mechanics can apparently be taken and implemented into player creations in Everywhere’s own landscape, but the opposite won’t be possible. There are a lot of rules here that could quickly get muddled.
In our discussion of the metaverse, crypto, and other contemporary terms that Everywhere is eager to discard, Benzies soon touches on the potential of AI. “It’s mind-blowing,” he tells me. “I didn’t think we had the tech to do some of the stuff that’s now happening, and so if we can leverage that, especially in our tools to just talk to it and say I want this so build it. Absolutely. I’m a huge fan of tools to make things easier. There’s nothing worse than reinventing the wheel when it comes to video games. We as developers love to rewrite physics systems, [but with AI] let’s just not bother, let’s do the fun stuff.”
AI is becoming an increasingly common tool in creative industries like video games. When I ask Benzies about whether this could result in fewer jobs or the distillation of talent in the field, he has the opposite view. “I don’t look at it like that,” Benzies states. “you’re able to do your job faster, and you can get to Maslow’s Peak faster with AI so I don’t see it as taking jobs away. I think it allows us to be more creative.”
Everywhere’s future is in flux, and whether its lofty potential can one day be fulfilled depends heavily on the audience its free-to-play nature can attract in a field rife with competitors. My final question touches on a mantra that Benzies shared when first previewing the game, and how it is capable of more than the medium has ever been before, and our way of describing video games in the past has been somewhat limited.
“To me, the word ‘game’ is kind of a bit underwhelming for what we’re doing here,” Benzies explains. “These are going to be worlds we’re going to be spending a lot more time with, and we’re going to be doing all the boring things in here. We’re going to be doing our shopping in here, we’re going to be doing our banking, we’re going to do our entertainment. It’s all going to be in these systems, so they’re all connected.”
All of these disparate elements might be connected, but in practice I’m unsure if Everywhere can either stick the landing or justify the loftiness of its premise. In its drive to appeal to everyone and distil the ways in which we consume digital media, it risks alienating us all.
