The most painful thing in the gaming industry is not the delay, but the sudden realization that the direction is wrong after three years of work. An RPG project originally positioned as “Battle Royale (Battle Royale)”. After investing in development for 3 years, the development team finally announced that the plan was directly canceled and the entire project was shifted to a new direction. What’s even more dramatic is that this transformed new game is neither entirely an MMO nor just a cooperative game, but a hybrid online experience somewhere in between.
After 3 years of playing battle royale, you stopped playing?
According to the development team, their original goal was to create a battle royale game that integrated an RPG growth system. However, as development progressed, the gameplay structure gradually became more complex and even began to deviate from the original design direction. In the end, the team reached a consensus that instead of continuing to support a framework that is no longer fun, it is better to cut it off and start over, dismantle the core system and shift to an online gameplay structure that is more suitable for long-term operations. In other words, this is not an optimization, but a direct U-turn!
The positioning of new games is awkward
The new version currently exposed is described as a larger-scale online RPG experience, but officials also admit that it neither emphasizes a huge world and interacts with a large number of players like traditional MMOs, nor is it limited to the squad mode like general cooperative games. This intermediate position also allows players to start discussing: Is this an innovation, or have they not figured out what they want to do?
However, the development team emphasized that their goal is to create a more flexible system that allows players to experience cooperative content and participate in larger-scale dynamic events without being restricted by a single mode.
Some people support it, and some people directly criticize it!
The player community has been decidedly divided in their response to this U-turn. Some people believe that being willing to decisively overturn and redo the game in the middle of development shows that the team insists on quality; but others believe that spending three years on a battle royale and then canceling it is proof of a wrong direction. A more realistic problem is that the current description on the Steam page is still vague, leaving many players unclear about what the selling point of this game is and can only wait and see.