“Hi. My name is Dean. I’m making an MMO […] because I believe I can.” That’s literally the straightforward pitch from a dev vlog from the solo creator of Noia Online, a browser-based pixel art sandbox MMO that entered open alpha at the beginning of this month.
In the aforementioned dev video, Dean admits that he’s “not breaking any new ground” and even calls his game a spiritual successor to Fantasy Online, a Flash-based solo MMO effort that incidentally is being remade itself. “I remember spending many an hour playing Fantasy Online […] and it was then that I realized that an MMO was not some crazy feat of coding prowess that could only be achieved by AAA developers; it could be just a guy who knew how to code.”
Noia Online is described as an easy enough game to pick up and play but also complicated enough that character building will be important. Our own brief stint within the current open alpha seems to reinforce as much; gameplay is typical of the genre, handholding is minimal but clicking around is second nature enough, and the weapons first handed over upon clearing an opening quest have what appear to be their own distinct trees, which suggests that there are multiple skills to learn as weapon use grows and levels are earned. It’s all very straightforward, much like the game’s Discord announcement of, “Game’s up.”
Those who are curious only need to fire up a browser that can deal with a Unity WebGL Player, players can follow a development Trello board, and Dean is scheduled to talk about launch in an upcoming video. This might not break new ground, but it is certainly functional.
