Welcome back to another roundup of MMORPGs, MMOs, and MMO-adjacent multiplayer games you’ve (probably) never heard of! If you have, however, we grant you permission to pat yourself on the back! Do it!
Iron and Incense
Korean studio Voyager just landed on Steam with a new multiplayer extraction shooter called Iron & Incense. The devs are calling it a PvPvE “urban extraction shooter” where “tactical gear collides with ancient jujutsu sorcery” in a supernatural cyberpunk version of Shibuya. No release details yet, but the “no IFF” system sounds wild.
Castalia
Let’s switch gears in every way imaginable to Castalia, a newly announced open-world 2-D MMORPG. “Think Maplestory mixed with Terraria,” the solo dev explains, though it’s action-based, not tab-target.
“It has all the usual systems that you expect. It’s not only built with network scalability in mind (using Rust), meaning large-scale PvP and PvE is possible but also content scalability: a custom game engine and editor. This custom editor allows for rapid, hand-crafted development of game content. […] I know the thought you may be having… another independently developed MMORPG. With so many starting and failing, I understand the concern. However, this is a passion of mine, for years now, and I have poured countless hours into it. The reason for its development is two-fold: I enjoy programming and playing MMORPGs. And, in my opinion, no extant MMORPG captures that large-scale, ‘world as toybox’ feeling anymore.”
Join Us
Join Us is solidly in the small-scale co-op genre; Canadian developer Wolf Haus Games has announced that it’s coming this fall, and of course we’re getting a new trailer too.
“JOIN US [is] a darkly satirical story-driven survival game that lets players design and command their own doomsday cult to prepare for the impending apocalypse. JOIN US builds upon established pillars of the survival genre, allowing solo players (or up to 4 friends in 2 to 4-player co-op) to grow their cult from the ground up, either in sandbox mode or as part of a 15-hour-plus scripted narrative campaign.”
We’re mostly just here for the ridable cows.
Spot another game? Drop us a tip and we’ll add it to our list! (No really, there’s like 10 new things in our queue still. It’s lovely!)
