On February 18, 2020, the team revealed its take on a futuristic shotgun, named the EPM28 Mastodon. Since the project’s earliest days, Ward B has shown off Oceanic’s arsenal, filling a devblog with immensely complex renders and in-universe explainer text. In its early stages, the studio saw its best success when showing off weapons. The goal, then, is to build a game that can attract the necessary investment, before going full-time on development – and that has meant Ward B’s done whatever it can to get the word out about Oceanic. We are not particularly, like, funded quite yet.”
“We don't have anything under our belt yet, we're completely indie,” explains Sauceda. Oceanic is a science fiction first-person hero shooter, and the debut game for Ward B – a 40-person team working mostly part-time, but with experience developing the likes of Call of Duty, Halo, Overwatch, and Destiny. The company now alleges that Kalashnikov Concern not only stole its weapon design but, in a bizarre twist, subsequently granted an entirely separate video game the rights to use it. Sauceda never gave his formal permission for the gun to be adapted for real life – and yet Kalashnikov Concern subsequently announced a weapon kit that bears what Sauceda sees as a striking resemblance to one of Ward B’s own creations. “But they've completely ripped that opportunity from us.” And we would have been the OGs of that.” Sauceda stops for a second. There's no game studio today that collaborated with a weapon manufacturer to make a fully operational firearm. For Sauceda, it wouldn’t just be recognition of his team’s hard work, it would be a genuine milestone for the industry – to his knowledge, it would mark the first time a video game gun had been turned into a physical, mass-market model.Ī render of Ward B's EPM28 Mastodon shotgun. A contractor for Russia’s largest weapons manufacturer, Kalashnikov Concern, Kuzin asked for permission to turn one of Ward B’s fictional weapons into a real-life shotgun. In fact, Ward B’s commitment to believability was so strong that, in early 2020, Maxim Kuzin arrived in Sauceda’s inbox. “There's actually a few weapons we ended up scrapping and not putting in the game because there were design flaws that we weren't too happy with in the end.” “We're looking to have them very, very scientifically explainable,” CEO Marcellino Sauceda tells me. Crucial to the team’s work – and the small following around Oceanic’s development – is that while the weapons in question are meant to reflect tech created 200 years in the future, they must look like they could feasibly work in reality.
The small team has been posting highly detailed weapon designs for its in-development game, Oceanic, since 2019. The developers at indie studio Ward B really like designing fictional guns.