Back in 2017 Left 4 Dead's writer Chet Faliszek left Valve, and he's now confirmed at the Reboot Develop conference in Canada that his new studio Stray Bombay is working on a co-op first-person shooter title (thanks, VG247).
Former Riot Games designer Kimberly Voll is helping with this project, which Faliszek said is "a first-person network shooter" made using Unreal Engine.
"One of the things that my co-founder worked on at Riot was about matchmaking and how we think about it," said Faliszek. "Some of that is about, say, you play Left 4 Dead on Thursday and you have a really good session, that game will ask you 'hey, do you want to friend this person?'. That's kind of like saying 'hey, we had a first date, let's get married'. It's really overstepping it."
"But if you know from session to session what's happening, you can say, 'hey, these people play together, they're looking for a game now on Thursday, so let's put them in the room together and give them the opportunity to play again. For us, the metrics are about social, it's not about skill."
"Then we can do cool things," he continued. "These people played four games together and they won so let's have the game go crazy against them, let's give them something that will kick their asses. We can make it easier and harder, because if we're tracking them over sessions we understand them. Nobody has done social matchmaking quite to the extent that we're doing it. When you have a normal lobby of four people you have to make that split second decision of do I like that person's name? No. I'm going to drop out of this. Then you keep getting the empty lobby or the one person lobby problem."
"We're giving you 20-30 minute play session where you complete something, come back, and you aren't your character, you play characters," he added.
Does this project sound promising?