Virtual reality, as a platform and as a place for MMORPGs, certainly appears to be dying on the vine, but that is not stopping lead developer Noah Bazer and his quest to create a “next-generation anime-style VR MMORPG” called Asteria: Fate of the Fallen.
In Asteria, players enter a colorful anime-like medieval fantasy world to partake in physics-driven melee combat and rune-casting magical combat, immersive crafting, and social activities like playing sports or owning shops and homes, while the overall narrative is focused less on a chosen one story and more about players attempting to rebuild and defend the main player city of Selara.
In his introduction video, Bazer claims that he and his team “have solved the hardest problems,” claiming that a weekend-long test with 100 players was able to run at an extremely low costs thanks to SpacetimeDB, which readers might recall is the backend tech stack BitCraft developer Clockwork Labs made open source recently.
This does, of course, lead to the fact that Asteria is seeking Kickstarter funding, but Bazer says in his video that the game is coming out “no matter what” and that crowdfunds will be used for bringing on more devs, adding new features, and speeding up development. And apparently there is a hunger for this kind of game, as the Kickstarter hit its $50K initial goal within 22 hours.
The campaign has 28 days remaining at the time of this writing, with stretch goals like guild halls, musical instruments, co-owning of player shops, PvP dueling among them. In the meantime, a look at what is being promised can be seen in action in the video below.
