Couldn't seem to find a release date for it, so I put it up as TBA in the release schedule with this image:
This is certainly my number 1 most wanted game right now. It's basically a
Life is Feudal: MMO with a big budget: a dream come true. And check out leaked alpha footage (the YouTuber says it's beta but he's full of shit):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esq00I00610Look at how wonderful and alive the map is at 8:06. How smooth the movement and combat—which was
LiF's biggest issue. They've got goddamn
fighting game devs working on that shit (from your
PC Gamer link):
Samuel Roberts wrote:Even though Amazon Game Studios Orange County used to be known as Double Helix, this exact team is something of a new creation. "Our executive producer Rich Lawrence spent 15 years making MMOs, and then we have combat specialists who made the combat in [games] like Killer Instinct and Breakaway, and then our world designers come from [games like] BioShock, and are focused on putting narrative into the world while they're designing this space. This is this team, as a unified team, their very first game, so we tried to assemble a bunch of people who were heavy hitters for their specific craft."
It's awesome that they are putting narrative in, like
LiF has some. And the New World is a terrific setting for it that has been screaming for this type of game since Dan Bunten's 1984 masterpiece,
The Seven Cities of Gold. It's just such a natural setting for a game revolving around crafting and construction, and then you have the various indigenous tribes playing the part of Civ's barbarians, etc. (because remember: this genre is first-person Civ), and a whole unspoilt continent to explore and fight over, and countless works of fictions to draw upon for narrative and atmospheric inspiration.
And then with Amazon's server know-how we'll get solid servers worldwide, and enough money to keep the game going for some time while it acquires a playerbase, and enough resources to quickly fix issues and respond to problems that are bound to come up with such a complex, cutting-edge, untried genre that the homebrew
LiF developer in some Russian steppe or whatever simply wasn't capable of dealing with.
LiF was a big success out the door, but something went wrong when their servers got flooded with players early this year on Steam release, and I wasn't there to figure out exactly what. Evidently some economy/balance issue that will of course be the number 1 problem to solve when you are trying to essentially make a
Rust with no wipes. Facepunch is trying to gradually
work up to persistence, but
LiF and this game are trying the top-down approach, so we'll see who succeeds first. Currently, my money is on Amazon, and I'll jump into this the moment the beta rolls around.
On a side note, I find it encouraging that the company of the richest man in the world is working on the best multiplayer genre in the world. It's no accident that man became so rich!
The UI by the way has HUGE
LiF influences. I feel like I am looking at a
LiF screen when I look at it. The devs don't talk about their immediate inspirations, for obvious or at least semi-obvious business and PR reasons, and that's where you need the critics to tell you what's really going on—and of course the
PC Gamer dude hasn't so much as heard of
LiF, or
Rust for that matter, let alone played them and be able to make comparisons.
Meanwhile, I can tell you that their
starting number of players at 500 is
Rust's maximum, while their ultimate goal of 10,000 is
LiF's exact number. These dudes have done their homework, and have the right games in their sights, and I can't wait to see what comes of it.
Insomnia's number 1 most wanted game right here. I should make some kind of award image to distinguish it on the frontpage.