foxhole (opens in new tab) Developer Siege Camp has announced a new project. Anvil Empire (opens in new tab) Players promise to engage in massive medieval battles with up to 1,000 players at once in an open-world sandbox.
The game takes place in the fantasy realm of Calligo, a persistent world populated by three “desperate alliances” in a constant state of war. The continent is full of different landscapes and dangerous creatures, as well as “dark secrets” of indeterminate type that the player can discover.
Medieval warfare was not just about whipping people in the face with heavy objects. If you don’t have a good grasp of the supply situation, you’re not going to succeed. To do so, players build and grow settlements, trade with friendly neighbors, raid enemy bases, build supply and siege camps, and maintain logistics lines to feed their troops. , must continue to fight.
Siege Camp (i.e. the studio) states that the in-game economy is “fully player-driven”, and settlements can grow to support hundreds of players at once. All takes place separately from combat (but at the same time, in the same world) and works on a much larger scale.
“Anvil Empires aims to support 1,000 players in close combat and thousands more in massive, persistent online worlds,” said the studio. said to vapor (opens in new tab)“Many mass-played PvP games either support a small number of combatants on the same dense battlefield, or a large number of players scattered across a large map. , the goal is to support the best of both worlds: players marching shoulder-to-shoulder in a dense environment.”
This scale is made possible by Siege Camp’s R2 Engine, which says Siege Camp “supports up to 1000 players in dense environments and tens of thousands of simulated and replicated entities in massive worlds.” says. The engine has been in development for several years and, in fact, a large tech demo of the engine took place in 2019.
“This is not just a working miracle technology, but it does take a pragmatic approach to meet the novel design requirements of Anvil Empire,” said Siege Camp. “This technology addresses real-world constraints, such as bandwidth and modern server CPU performance limitations, but overcomes them by leveraging parallel processing, modern network replication techniques, and application-specific optimizations. overcome.”
Sounds very ambitious, but Siege Camp managed to pull it off with their WWII MMO, Foxhole. full release (opens in new tab) In 2022 after 5 years of early access. It, too, relies heavily on logistics for its success, and unlike most other games, it succeeds in enriching its non-combat supporting characters.
Staff writer Morgan Park wrote in September 2022 that “the distribution of players is surprisingly balanced between front-line fighters and blue-collar factory workers.” (opens in new tab) Impressions of Foxhole. “I’ve played a few military his sims, including FPS like Squad, but the logistic (or ‘logi’) role is mostly ignored by players who prefer shooting guns to driving trucks back and forth will be Foxhole’s persistent world is probably because the logi portion of the game is as deep as Frontline. ”
At this time, there are no indications of an Anvil Empires release date, but it’s safe to assume it’s a long way off. Siege Camp described the game as “an incredibly complex game that takes a lot of experimentation and iterations to get it right”, and like Foxhole, it takes a lot of iterations and live playtesting to get it right. said it would.
A free pre-alpha test will begin in April to kickstart that process. Siege Camp warns that “only a small subset of basic functionality will be put in place” and players will need “high tolerance to play early development builds with bugs and incomplete features” But if you’re happy with all this, you can sign up for action Anvil Empires Discord Server (opens in new tab).
