WHAT. IS. MINDSEYE?

MindsEye releases in exactly two weeks. The game is the first project from Build A Rocket Boy and is being led by the point man behind GTA Online. Yet its marketing seems non-existent, and details as to what the game actually is have been suspiciously hard to find. 

It’s also worth noting that the game’s director, Leslie Benzies, founded the Edinburgh-based Build A Rocket Boy (originally called Royal Circus) in 2017 in collaboration with Matthew Smith and Colin Entwistle, post a split with Rockstar that resulted in a court case over unpaid royalties regarding GTA Online itself. After announcing this new studio, the company saw funding from private investors in China and New York, leading to the opening of a second and third office in LA and Budapest. 

A second legal disagreement arose in 2019, when Take-Two, the owners of Rockstar and GTA, issued a preemptive legal warning to Build a Rocket Boy, accusing the studio of attempting “to solicit Rockstar Games’ (RSG) employees”. The warning, written by Dale Cendali, an intellectual property lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, also stated, “It appears that Royal Circus Games may have targeted these employees based on knowledge of confidential personnel and business practices only available to it because of the former RSG employees’ prior employment at RSG.”

All of this is to say that MindsEye isn’t a small project. According to Build A Rocket Boy’s LinkedIn, the studio employs between 201-500 employees, however, not all those people are working on MindsEye. You see, MindsEye is apparently only a smaller part of a large project called Everywhere, which is described as “A community-driven gaming platform where you can build, remix, and play together in a vast connected world”, according to the game’s YouTube channel. If you are wondering what that means in terms not designed to get investors to think of Ready Player One, Everywhere is basically a Roblox for adults. If you check out its YouTube channel, you’ll see videos from the closed beta showing off the user-facing tool designed to facilitate this, “Arcadia”. 

In short, Arcadia is a level editor that allows you to make user-generated levels like Fortnite’s creator mode. You then access these levels through a Fortnite-looking hub world called Everywhere. And MindsEye is a game that Build A Rocket Boy has built using some of those tools… I think.

If you aren’t confused yet, don’t worry, there is more. MindsEye launches in about two weeks but was first shown off at Gamescom 2022 with a single shot at the end of the trailer for Everywhere, teasing the involvement of actor Alex Hernandez in some part of the game/metaverse/whatever. In March 2023, MindsEye got its first proper teaser, which urged players to sign up for a newsletter on Everywhere’s website. I can’t track down any press releases that accompanied this trailer, but I am assuming it mentioned that MindsEye would be playable within, Everywhere, because both IGN and GameSpot trailer write-ups mention that.

Also in March 2023, Build A Rocket Boy invited journalists to its Edinburgh studio to check out Everywhere. Reception was tepid, with Jade King at TheGamer titling her piece “Everywhere Preview: We Have Fortnite At Home”. Other outlets’ previews seem equally lukewarm, comparing the experience to being pitched metaverse concepts that were so popular with investors during the pandemic.

Things continue to get more confusing in October 2024 when it is announced that IO Interactive’s publishing wing would be taking on publishing duties of MindsEye... but not Everywhere. It was at this time – I am guessing – that MindsEye and Everywhere became uncoupled, because it would be strange if Build A Rocket Boy needed a different company to publish its game on a platform that Build A Rocket Boy owns.

At the time, IO Interactive’s Hakan Abrak stated, “The publishing deal we have is on MindsEye. They are still working on the Everywhere product, but that's something that is with Build a Rocket Boy. So there will be more communication about the synergies and connections to that. But our deal and our publishing deal collaboration is on MindsEye, which is a full AAA universe in itself.”

OK, so MindsEye is no longer part of Everywhere, but they will synergise, got it. In Sony’s State of Play from February this year, we got our best look at MindsEye so far in a minute-long gameplay trailer. That trailer re-muddied the water around MindsEye's connection to Everywhere ending with a splash screen directing people to MindsEye.game and a copyright notice at the bottom that reads “MindsEye© is an EVERYWHERE© world. Published by IO Interactive A/S.”

There is no better place to mention, but it's around this point as well when store pages started going up for MindsEye, confirming it as a boxed retail product, with a retail price for €60 / £56 / $60.

In the last two weeks, we have seen more of MindsEye than at any point so far; however, the delivery mechanism for this new info has been somewhat baffling. Without any fanfare, Build A Rocket Boy released a trailer called “MindsEye - Official Gameplay Teaser #2”. This video is a bizarrely unedited one-minute-long clip of someone driving in the game’s Las Vegas-inspired world, with the player character talking to an NPC over phone about things we don’t understand because we’ve only seen about a collective minute and a half of footage of the game in the last three years.

This video is really wild, and you need to watch it. It feels less like video game advertising and more like an accidental recording I’d make on my PlayStation when I meant to take a screenshot.

Fret not, though. Yesterday – 15 days out from the game’s release – we were finally introduced to MindsEye, in a trailer called “Introducing MindsEye”. So, I ask myself for what feels like the tenth time, “What is MindsEye?” 

Well… It's still complicated. This trailer is also weird, but in a more traditional sense, we get a narrator telling us how MindsEye is a totally revolutionary single-player experience with a thrilling narrative and proceeds to show us footage of a lot of GTA-looking shooting and driving missions with a few nice-looking cutscenes thrown in there. However, where things get weird is in the later half of the six and a half minute long deep dive. After showing footage of what was presumably several story missions for this techno-future GTA-like, the dulcet voice-over man tells us about “PLAY.MINDSEYE”. What this seems to be is an in-universe way to jump into user-generated levels.

Apparently, these “rips in time” will be scattered throughout the world or playable through a menu, and the trailer shows off a screen with several memories created by Build A Rocket Boy so we can get a feel of what kind of content we’re dealing with here. These seem to be single-player mini-missions with names like “Checkpoint Race - Winging it” or ”Clean Up On Aisle 3” and descriptions like “Drive round the runways in time, evading take-offs and landings”, or “You’re a member of the Backniners who has just carried out a heist but someone sounded the alarm and the Police have come. You’re forced to have to fight your way to freedom and a waiting getaway car, if you can make it that far,” respectively.

The trailer positions these as a “never-ending stream of new gameplay”, but for real this time, WHAT IS THIS!? Because after watching this trailer, I think these are just GTA Online-like missions without the other players. Do a race. Do a shoot-out. Do a carjacking. And I can’t help but ask, “To what end, though?” Unlike GTA, you aren’t earning money on minor jobs, so your character can buy a new car or an apartment. You’re just kind of doing them? What’s more, if you think this is a LittleBigPlanet situation where a lot of the joy will come from making levels and sharing them with your friends, maybe cool your jets. You see, MindsEye’s level creation, which seems to use the same tools as Everywhere’s but with a more limited range of assets, and is only accessible for PC players. In fact, the trailer is a minute shorter on the PlayStation YouTube channel because the last minute where these creation tools are detailed is just chopped off the end of the video.

The last notable thing about the trailer, and it's very, very notable, is the roadmap that pops up on screen at the end.

This screen details what is in the game at launch… and what isn’t. Notably, multiplayer, which isn’t being added until Fall/Autumn, thus confirming that all these activities will, in fact, be played on your own. What is included is also notable because it's not much. There is:

• The free roam around the city
• Two Combat Missions - which I think means story missions, because apparently this thing is episodic, so the game’s narrative will be drip-fed through these.
• Six Races
• Six more Checkpoint Races
• Three Drone Races
• And one map for a horde mode with the second horde mode map locked behind a premium pass, which will presumably cost you extra

The game will apparently also launch with a 15-hour-long standalone campaign, according to Adam Whiting, the game’s assistant game director. However, this runs directly counter to how Build A Rocket Boy described the game two years ago, when MindEye was referred to as an  “episodic AAA project to be released within Everywhere itself.” So it is unclear if more story content will be added over time or if this is it.

Build A Rocket Boy also held very limited previews, mainly for YouTubers, over a video call on Teams over the last few days, which seems to have gone down poorly. Many of these videos point out how generic it all looks, and several voiced their displeasure around the event being hands-off – something you’d expect for a game two years away from releasing, not two weeks.

And after all of that, I’m still asking: what is MindsEye? It's a single-player game that was once episodic but now isn’t… I think. It's a multiplayer game sandbox that doesn’t have multiplayer right now, so it's mainly replayable missions and one map for a horde mode. It’s a user-generated content hub… but you can only create this content on PC. It’s no longer part of Everywhere, but it was built with Everywhere and Build A Rocket Boy wants to use this game to get you into Everywhere somehow, maybe. It’s… I have no idea, man.

I took a quick look at the game’s official Discord to assuage fears. Over the course of the last 24 hours, Mark Gerhard, who uses the Discord name MMG and is the CTO and Co-CEO of Build A Rocket Boy, has taken to the platform to imply that an unnamed company has been paying influencers and press to cover the game negatively. This started when users in the MindsEye channel were talking about the unenthused coverage, and a user called “kocgiri_ks” asked, “Do you think that all people who reacted negatively were financed by someone?” To which Gerhard replied, “100%”, and in follow-up post “Doesn’t take much to guess who.”

This was quickly followed up with another user, “Phonogram” posting, “a co-CEO for a studio implying another studio is paying previewers to talk negatively about your game is an absolutely wild comment to make in a public environment in any situation”. To which Gerhard replied, “Not wild when it's true.”

Following on from this, GTA content creator GameRoll chimed in to seek confirmation. “So just to clarify - you believe that individuals, be it content creators or otherwise, have been paid off to criticise MindsEye?” At which point Gerhard rolled back his comments slightly, saying, “No I never said that. I do KNOW that there are bot farms posting negative comments and dislikes.”

This is obviously a pretty spurious and serious accusation to make against both the people who took part in your preview event and another company, especially since this comment sent the Discord off into deep speculation about how this other company had to be Gerhard’s previous employer, Rockstar.

So, after all this research, poorly communicated changes of direction, confusion as to what I’m actually buying, and community drama, did I learn anything from this? Yeah.

I have no idea what MindsEye is, and I do not even really care anymore.