Having been through round after round of alpha testing last year, the sci-fi MMORTS of Starborne is ready to sail into the stars once more with an open beta starting on 2nd April.
Solid Clouds’ creation is pretty atypical in modern gaming, calling back to the early experiments with MMO games and online RTS. Played out in real time over the course of eight weeks, up to thousands of players are able to claim a star system as each server instance starts up, found their own and race to build up through the early stages. This eventually turns to alliance and federation building, with the ultimate goal being to capture and build up a Dyson Sphere or be more complete than your rivals in other parts of the galaxy.
The Open Beta sees a major overhaul to the game, creating three ways to win a game of Starborne – military, industrial and domain. To help with that, there’s a new galactic map with zones designed to encourage empire building and expansion, while the alliance size has been reduced to 15 and the game lengthened to 10 weeks. Hoping to keep players engaged, there’s also a preview of a companion app on Android on the way.
Speaking about the Open Beta launch, Stefán Gunnarsson, co-founder and CEO of Solid Clouds said, “I’m so proud of the new map design. It really manages to condense all the lessons we’ve learned over the past 5 years. With it, we are both catering to more play styles and also able to supercharge the deeply player-driven political side of the game.“
We dove into the game back in August, and you can check out the preview here. From the above changes, it definitely sounds like the game is heading in the right direction, and can hopefully do more to sustain players’ interest for the duration of a match.
Source: press release
