The Repopulation’s spun-off survival sandbox, Fragmented, is pivoting in a big way, MOP reader DK pointed out to us over the weekend.
In a message on its official forums last week, Above & Beyond told players that it’s porting Fragmented to Xbox One and experimenting with VR.
“We expected Fragmented to bring in more money than it has to date, and that has slowed down the process as we’re aren’t staffed to nearly the level we were before the Hero Engine issues. We will have the Xbox version of Fragmented out soon though, which should hopefully solve that situation, but it has us running behind schedule currently with most of our resources focusing on getting that finished, so that we have an additional revenue stream. We have done a lot of work on the NPC, and engagement systems, and some but a lesser amount of work on the mission system. VR is a new addition we are experimenting with now that we have upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.12.5, and that changes the way you want to approach certain things which don’t work as well in VR as they do traditionally. As you can see from Fragmented, we have many of the models and such already moved over. What we don’t have though is a world or content. Our staff currently consists of programmers, artists, an audio person, GM and support staff. We haven’t been able to bring the content team back into the fold yet, which has bottlenecked development to an extent.”
As for The Repopulation itself, we reported over the weekend that A&B still plans to have a playable limited client in the new engine later this year, and while the team is frustrated, it’s also optimistic. “This time last year there was a lot of optimism around here, by this point Repop would have already been launched,” says the studio’s J.C. Smith. “Over the past ten months though we’ve been scrambling to put the pieces back together after the October mess at Idea Fabrik. There is probably no way to ever fully recover from that, as the stench of it will always be there. All we can do is to keep working with what we have, and developing towards the goal.”
