Co-op games promise shared experiences, but too often break down when players have different playstyles, turning collaboration into compromise instead of connection. That friction is exactly what NEARstudios is trying to solve with Hawthorn, a co-op RPG designed around the idea that players should be able to share a world without sharing the same role in it.
A decade before NEARstudios existed, cofounder and CEO Heather Cerlan was already running into this problem at home. Despite working at studios like Naughty Dog and Bethesda, she and her spouse struggled to find co-op games they could both stick with. One preferred action-heavy gameplay, while the other leaned toward slower, cozy experiences. The result was a familiar pattern across the genre: compromise that eventually led to disengagement.
Rethinking how co-op games work with Hawthorne
Across the industry, cofounder Jason Richardson had been exploring a similar frustration through years of playing games with his family. When the two connected in 2022, they realized they were approaching the same idea from different directions, and Hawthorn became the answer.
Set in a Victorian-inspired world of anthropomorphic woodland creatures, Hawthorn blends RPG progression, exploration, home-building, and community-driven systems. Instead of forcing players into a single loop, it allows them to coexist in the same session while pursuing entirely different goals. One player might be venturing into the wilderness, while another focuses on building and experiencing life inside the village.
That flexibility is central to NEARstudios’ design philosophy. The team itself is intentionally small, built around developers who have personally experienced the limitations they are trying to solve.
Development has been accelerated through partnerships with Dell and Nvidia. A Dell Pro Max Tower T2 workstation equipped with dual Nvidia RTX PRO GPUs has significantly reduced iteration times, turning processes that once took long cycles or failed entirely on consumer hardware into workflows completed in minutes.Hawthorn is an attempt to close a long-standing gap in how cooperative games are designed, shifting the focus from shared actions to shared space. Explore how Hawthorn is targeting an underserved co-op audience and how Dell and Nvidia are helping power its development here.