The Repopulation lead dev Joshua Halls says that Above & Beyond has opened closed testing for Fragmented to selected applicants. Interested gamers should fill out the form and come prepared with a decent machine:
“Testing will require Windows Vista or higher. 64bit OS is also required to run the game. 4GB or more of system RAM, 10GB of remaining storage space, and a graphics card with 1GB of VRAM and DX11 support. We recommend a quad core CPU, 8GB of system RAM, SSD with 10+ GB storage remaining, and a GTX 660 or better graphics card (~ATI 7870 or better). These requirements are not finalized yet.”
You’re going to need Steam too, of course.
Back in January, A&B told backers and early access players that its solution to the HeroEngine crisis was to switch The Repopulation to Unreal Engine, in the interim creating survival sandbox Fragmented using the same foundation and assets. Fragmented will be free to current Repop owners. A&B’s JC Smith explained it all to us a few weeks ago:
Much of the code will be identical between the two games. Repop starts with the Fragmented base, and then will add additional features on top of it. So in that regard we don’t feel like we’re losing any time in the short term. In the long-term they will separate a bit more as Repop will have more complexity and some features will have additional detail in Repop that wouldn’t make sense in Fragmented. But we’ll be sharing a lot of code between the two and the programming team will be touching both sides. The modding kits will also be similar, so players who are created mods or custom servers shouldn’t have a major problem porting their modifications between the two games.
