Battle Royales have taken over the gaming industry. It all started with H1Z1, but PUBG is what took the world by storm, and now Fortnite is no longer nipping at their heels but taking over the market. Like MOBAs years ago, everywhere we turn, new Battle Royales are popping up. The newest Battle Royale – Mavericks: Proving Grounds – hopes to challenge the rest with a 400-person Battle Royale.

For veteran gamers, this may sound somewhat familiar. At the height of online first-person shooters in 2010 – the era of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield: Bad Company – we got MAG. MAG’s claim to fame was that it would host more players in a single battle than ever before. It received a Guinness World Record for “Most Players in a Console FPS” with 256 players duking it out simultaneously across a vast battlefield. However, despite decent reviews and hoping to ride high on their big player count, MAG faded into obscurity rather quickly and shutdown entirely by 2014. With Mavericks: Proving Grounds first teasers of information entirely about player count, it seems like we may be revisiting the past.

Very little is known about Mavericks: Proving Grounds aside from its goal of making the largest Battle Royale ever. Coming from the new game studio Automaton, the project is a bit of an anomaly. Its first big announcement – the trailer above – is in regards to its Battle Royale mode; however, the game has been described a bit differently on their website:

There are a few things to pick apart here, but the biggest is that Automaton has described Mavericks as an MMO but also that it will support 1000 concurrent players in a single “instance”. This seems a bit confusing. Even Destiny 2 does not call itself an MMO, instead taking inspiration from the genre but understanding that the ‘Massive’ part of an MMO is considerably larger than 1000. It’s unknown if Mavericks will be an actual MMO supporting instances of 1000 players, or if Automaton qualifies Mavericks as an MMO because of these 1000 person instances.

It’s also hard to figure out just what Mavericks will be. It will support “character progression, social hubs, intelligent mission systems and global-scale player-driven narrative,” but it has few, if any, details to support this. It could feature zones with objectives – and this could be the 1000 player instances it speaks of – or it could be an expansive universe like Star Citizen. At this stage, it is little more than an idea though.

One thing is certain. If the only positive thing that Automaton can come up with about Mavericks: Proving Grounds is that it will have large fights and nice graphics, they are going to need to step up their game. It takes a little more than that to prove yourself in 2018.