Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Bossa Games is working on a new multiplayer game with skyships and islands and gliding and rappelling! OK, you know we weren’t going to get through this article without talking about Worlds Adrift, Bossa’s MMO, which hit early access in 2018 and closed down only a year later. Hopefully, the studio’s learned a few things about MMOs in the years since, as this week it announced an “open world co-op adventure” called Lost Skies, which both visually and conceptually looks a lot like the earlier title.
“Lost Skies draws inspiration from one of Bossa’s earlier games called Worlds Adrift,” Bossa’s Luke Williams acknowledges. “The idea of adventuring among the clouds was at the heart of that game too, and we’ve always loved that core concept. So we’re thrilled to be able to head skyward again to bring players a completely new and ultimately very different co-op-focused experience that shares a lot of that same spirit.”
“In Lost Skies, players team up to explore a vast world made up of floating islands. The skies are full of opportunities to build customised sky-ships, brave ferocious storms, battle monsters and solve the mysteries of ancient civilisations, forgotten technologies and the story of the shattered world. Lost Skies builds on the ideas and gameplay of the previous Bossa game Worlds Adrift, but is an entirely new game based on cooperative survival exploration. Playing solo or with up to five companions, players can once again grapple, glide, climb and sail across a massive open world of hand-crafted islands in the sky.”
Readers will recall that the main issue with the sandboxy, builder-oriented Worlds Adrift was its open PvP environment, which generated a brutal and unforgiving community; players and testers called out the excessive griefing during development, but it was only after launch that the devs moved to counter it – halfheartedly – and by then, it was too late to save the game. Here’s Bossa’s CEO, Henrique Olifiers, suggesting that Lost Skies won’t make the same mistake with PvP:
“Lost Skies will offer a strong experience for solo players or team members striking off to explore on their own. Or that, in hosting your own Lost Skies server, you can’t make it a PvP variant (you can just as well). But unlike Worlds Adrift’s wild, massively multiplayer world, Lost Skies features a curated universe full of environmental challenges, with a steady progression path gated by titanic enemies and storm walls designed to push you and your crew to the limits of your ingenuity.”
So far, we know it’s coming to PC “with information on other platforms to come.” The studio is also promising some sort of test phase governed by “innovative open development” later in 2023.
