Corepunk has become one of those early access MMORPGs that keeps falling off the radar owing to a range of factors – not being on Steam, not keeping up consistent comms, and not having a loud and vocal playerbase beating down the doors. But it is still under development, and studio Artificial Core has finally popped its head back up to acknowledge what’s going on with a very long and detailed roadmap in text form, though the studio doesn’t actually call it that.
“We’ve been quiet for a while – not because there’s nothing to share, but because we’ve been completely immersed in critical, time-sensitive tasks,” the team says. Apparently, that includes continuing work on the Prison Island, which isn’t done, but now the team is moving on with new content while tinkering on the island “in parallel.” Indeed, some of that work is arriving today in the form of a patch that introduces the new weapon talent UI, the third episode of the MSQ in the reworked Steppes zone, 83 new quests, and full voice acting.
As for Prison Island itself, the devs are rolling out a test season meant to “spice up repeatable island gameplay,” with unique seasonal quests and rotating weekly content, with mount rewards to entice players to tackle them. Over what sounds like the rest of the summer, the studio will be adding more weapon talents, runes, and the PvP arenas. Beyond that, we’re looking at a new dungeon with two modes (one times, one competitive).
“[I]n an ideal world, we’d like to release all of this content within the next two months,” Artificial Core concludes. “In parallel, we’re also working on several PvP modes in the format of small and medium-sized battlegrounds, and we’ll try to squeeze their release into the same time frame. And as usual, we’ll be doing a large number of fixes, bug patches, gameplay improvements, balance changes, and many different quality-of-life features. The game will continue to improve noticeably every week and month, and at an even more active pace.”
The not-a-roadmap keeps going at that point, with teases for September (heroes, guilds, and events in the open world). The devs also confirm they are hoping to not wipe the early access version again before launch by the end of the year, but it will definitely be wiping at launch so that everyone starts from scratch. Expect a ramp-up of marketing and influencers in the meantime.
