If you thought Foxhole is a great MMO – as we sure do – and were wishing its devs would expand their skills to fresh settings, then feast your eyeballs on Anvil Empires, Siege Camp’s next big thing. The studio rolled up to Steam yesterday with a new dev blog introducing the medieval war simulator on a massive scale.
“Anvil Empires is a large scale game of conquest played by thousands in a persistent online world. Players will take on the role of an individual citizen and build towns, form empires, and ultimately wage war in ages that last weeks at a time. Wars are won not only through strength of arms, but by having a strong economy and supply chain to feed and arm armies of players. The conflict is fully driven by player actions and takes place in an organic world with no safe zones or artificial barriers to PvP. While Anvil Empires will share many elements with Foxhole, including a persistent world, sandbox gameplay, mass collaboration, and a ‘cog in the wheel’ player perspective, it will also be very different in other areas. There will be a bigger emphasis on settlement building and the conflict will support an order of magnitude more players, allowing up to a thousand players to march alongside each other on the battlefield.”
Yes, they said a thousand players in a single battle, with more spread out across the world, though if there’s a thousand-person battle live on your server, you’re probably going to zip right over to join it anyway. To support those numbers, Siege Camp says it’s developed a new custom “R2 Engine” (R²Engine) specifically for this game.
Pre-alpha is set to begin in April, though the devs stress it’s a real pre-alpha for genuine testers, not a free-for-all. Interested players should hawk the game’s Discord, where signup rounds apparently open and close as the studio needs bodies. Do note that the pre-alpha will run on Steam and will not be pay-to-test.
Oh, and don’t worry about Foxhole. “Anvil Empires is being developed by a separate division within Siege Camp,” the team says. “The Foxhole team will continue to support and expand on Foxhole for many years to come with new features, content, and improvements.”
