Back in January, we learned the fate of The Repopulation: The Hero Engine team from Idea Fabrik would be taking over development of the game from its original developers at Above & Beyond following a lengthy dispute between the two that took the alpha offline for more than a year. It returned online and relaunched on Steam earlier this spring, promising an update in May after major issues were discovered in the code.
And here we are now in May, and the new team says the staging build is nearly live. The latest dev post promises that the “core vision” is still in line with A&B’s, will stay away from pay-to-win, will expand “to include multiple play styles” for PvE and PvP, will consider new and different rulesets, and will lay the groundwork for “future expansions.” The update is dubbed Condorslug, “first and foremost the start of the renovation to replication within every game system, at its very core this is about bug fixing and trying to get things in a much better place.” Expect new shaders, redone heightmaps, new textures, and yes, wipes.
Oh yeah, and expect to shell out some dough too, as the studio is “aiming to re-enable the purchasing of higher tiers” once the dust has settled.
Deeper into the alpha, the team says,
“Virtually every single system will be looked at, from combat, inventory and even movement, all the way up to crafting. For the most part the systems game play will not change to be entirely new, unless the community has deemed it so. This is going to be a slow process, it does mean alpha is going to last a lot longer, but we do hope to have more frequent smaller patches when all of the World is revamped. When all of the systems are done with the first pass, we should be looking at the end of the Alpha cycle. Then we move on to Beta.”
