Christofer Sundberg, the Avalanche Studios co-founder and Just Cause creator, and his new studio Liquid Swords have picked the date for the first reveal of their long-teased AAA open-world action game. The announcement is coming on Dec. 4, 2025.
The studio spent four years calling it simply #Game1. A month ago, they dropped a teaser, and it’s finally time to show what they have been cooking. “Mark it however you want. Just brace for impact,” they say.
We’re very excited for this game because Sundberg has very strong credentials. He co-founded Avalanche Studios in 2003, created Just Cause, and served as the studio’s creative officer for a long time. His portfolio includes Just Cause 1 and 2, Mad Max, Rage 2, theHunter, the canceled Iron Man game, and more. He left Avalanche in 2019 after more than 15 years of making some of the most creatively explosive games on the market.
In 2020, he was making games again, this time with Liquid Swords, a studio in Stockholm that was founded with a clear philosophy of “zero-nonsense game development with no crunches.” Since then, the dev team has been making their first big open-world title, which they were calling #Game 1.
The studio has been pitching it as being narrative-driven, hardboiled, AAA revenge story, which was further confirmed in Sundberg’s recent reply to a fan hoping that it’s a grounded experience: “All respect to developers of fantasy/sci-fi games, but it’s just not for us. This is more like… Mad Max… Payne.” The recent ten-second teaser added to it, showcasing a dirty, drab, downtrodden city with traffic going through the empty streets. Very Max Payne.
But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Liquid Swords either. While the devs pitch the game as a AAA experience, they still had to cut an undisclosed number of staff and scale down to a smaller, “dedicated team,” as they had to adapt to what Sundberg calls “headless chicken-mode” games business. The NetEase-backed studio still intends to deliver on the promise of UE5-powered open world with story as a core gameplay mechanic.
Doesn’t sound too exciting in a vacuum, but the current state of the open-world action games set in modern times makes it more interesting. It’s been 12 years since GTA V launched in 2013, and the sixth installment won’t be here for another year. Sleeping Dogs has been sleeping for so long that even its biggest enthusiasts stopped asking for a new one. Avalanche’s Contraband was quietly killed off by Xbox, and Sundberg has already said that a Just Cause 5 won’t happen because almost no one from the original team still works there.
We also saw Saints Row remake firmly faceplant both critically and commercially in 2022, taking Volition with it. Mafia went back to its Italian roots, yet a strong but narrower prequel set in early-1900s Sicily is not what people think of when they say “GTA-like.” We had MindsEye recently, but it also didn’t go as the former Rockstar president Leslie Benzies had wanted.
At the same time, we have a cascade of games by “former X devs.” We have Dispatch, a recent superhero comedy from the ex-Telltale developers at AdHoc. The Blood of Dawnwalker, led by CD Projekt RED alumni, is shaping up to be the next big RPG. Archetype Entertainment’s Exodus looks to be the spiritual successor to Mass Effect, built by former BioWare leads.
The press releases for all of them say: “from the creators of [your favorite game],” and this is clearly working to gather initial interest. This is the ecosystem Sundberg and Liquid Swords are walking into. Only time will tell if he will deliver an Awards Season darling like Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, or a 37 on Metacritic like MindsEye. We won’t learn the answer on Dec. 4, but we, at the very least, will have a glimpse into the studio’s direction.
