Idea Fabrik is forging onward in its plan to re-start The Repopulation game servers, forum posts from the last couple of weeks suggest. The company told fans that it’s been working on transferring data to Steam.
“Once the transfers are complete, we’re still going to have the usual spin-up time and make sure that there isn’t any data/bit-rot, making sure that everything is working correctly, etc.,” Community Manager Christopher Riley told backers a week ago in response to questions about when the test server would resume service. “So as of this post it should be about 2 weeks after the transfers.”
Another post indicates that “a few” of the 10-man team in fact worked on The Repopulation prior to its ownership transfer.
The Repopulation, first Kickstarted in 2012, was crippled at the end of 2015 by a nasty public contract dispute between its original development team, Above & Beyond, and Idea Fabrik, which leased the Hero Engine. The Repopulation has been offline ever since. Though A&B spent 2016 working on survival sandbox Fragmented with the intent of getting Repop back online, last month the studio announced it had sold the game to Idea Fabrik instead, a move that, we were told, was in the best interests of the game and the playerbase.
Idea Fabrik has previously stated it will re-release the alpha, then progress to a beta and then launch as development continues. Pay-to-win is not something the studio aims to entertain, though microtransactions are a certainty.
