Indie MMO TitanReach has had a strange run to date. It caught our attention in 2020, when it launched a $430,000 US Kickstarter, which did not fund. Sydney-based Square Root Studios then announced plans for Indiegogo, insisting to us afterward that it would use fixed-funding rather than flexible-funding. Within a few months, the developers were posting that the game needed funding or it would meet certain doom. Doom was apparently averted, but the Indiegogo never materialized; instead, the team put up a credit storefront, which was exactly the type of flexible-funding people had been suspicious about in the months prior. Then the studio bungled with a statement it later stealth-retracted about its working conditions and worker pay, and its community lashed out at the media who covered it. It, uh, wasn’t going well for the game.
Since then, however, Square Root has cleaned up its image. TitanReach hit early access in March with a $70 price tag, and it’s been pumping out dev blogs with concept art and modeling all spring and into summer as game development has seemingly marched along.
Most recently, Square Root ran a promotional blog over on the MMORPG subreddit that reveals a bit more about the state of the game and its future than the dev blogs have. Longtime readers will already know that the game is a modern action-combat take on the old-school MMO ideal, akin to RuneScape, with a focus on skilling up, PvE and PvP combat, questing, social systems, and a player-driven economy (but no auction house). But the studio now says it has 16 developers, that it’s been replacing its stock assets with unique ones, and that there’s quite a bit of content on deck before the previously announced 2022 release window, including the rest of the skills, NPC AI, guilds, achievements, tmog, dungeons, market stalls, quests, and plenty more. It’s… a lot. And yes, there will be a full wipe after early access and “most likely after the closed alpha as well.” Player housing will come “at some point after [the] full release.”
While the game’s earlier controversies weren’t mentioned in the Reddit thread, the devs do address the game’s monetization.
“Currently, we’ve only announced a subscription fee (not including the Early Access and Closed Alpha costs) as well as limited goods on the TitanReach store, found on the website. Those items on the TitanReach website are elements of the old Kickstarter rewards we had originally when attempting to fund the game through their platform. Nothing on there is P2W at all, mostly cosmetics and titles. We’re definitely anti P2W and while we’d love to make a blanket statement saying nothing else will be added to the store, it really depends on where crowdfunding takes us in the future as a team of 16 is not cheap to maintain.”
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• TitanReach answers questions about development, items, and future content
• TitanReach attempts to put its controversies in the past with new details on early access development
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• TitanReach shows off crafting stations and NPC creation, promises servers are ‘ready to launch’
• TitanReach addresses early access funding – and how it pays its staff
• TitanReach promises to start its limited early access on February 28
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyk1S3ulGAg
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