central industriesa European video game studio founded in 2019, finally revealed its first project on Wednesday – a new MMO role-playing game called Bucks Day. Mainframe describes it as a “massive player-driven social sandbox” full of political intrigue and player groups that number in the thousands, a potent mix of eve online And Rust. What Polygon was able to see during a brief, hands-off demo in late February was a pretty impressive game, but questions remain about whether or not the seasoned team of industry veterans can achieve their ambitious goals — which include a PC version as well as a client-based The Cloud can be played on “any screen”, including consoles and mobile phones.
Bucks Day It is a high fantasy MMO filled with gameplay elements borrowed from the survival genre, such as games Ark: Survival Evolved. In motion it appears The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, but it’s built using Unreal Engine 5. It features gorgeous lighting and material interaction, with realistically rippling cloth, bouncing hair, and shafts of light catching dust particles as they stream through the windows of rustic cottages. Moreover, the game borrows its economic model from Evewhich means that both geography and scarcity will play a role in a dynamic market.
Image: Mainframe Industries
Image: Mainframe Industries
Image: Mainframe Industries
“Being an MMORPG, harvesting and crafting are the main pillars of the in-game experience,” said Mainframe CEO Thor Gunnarsson. “But in our world, the weapons, the armor, the building pieces needed for your village, these are all items made and built by the players themselves. So basically, all the things you have access to in the world have been produced by someone else in the game.”
Great item to play in Bucks Day is exploration, which in the early game will see small groups working together in order to make connections to nearby settlements. during the opening moments, Bucks DayOne nuance is immediately apparent, and it starts with how geography affects gameplay.
Players will start out at relatively high altitudes, among the green and ethereal areas known as the Heartlands. There they can work with other players in absolute security, build small villages with their clan, grow crops, and craft equipment. Sight lines from Heartlands are purposefully long, and Gunnarsson is quick to point out that anything a player sees somewhere they can go. What is most interesting is what will motivate them to try and get there.
Gunnarsson said: “When it comes to adventure from the Heartlands, the next area really is wild. This is where darkness leads to more dangerous encounters. Mysteries spread across the world, and you begin to unveil the ancient traditions of the world – its truly wondrous past – Through what we call a kind of indirect inner puzzle.
Image: Mainframe Industries
Image: Mainframe Industries
Image: Mainframe Industries
We got a chance to observe the developers playing through an in-game mission, and it was very different from how missions work in other MMOs. Lead game designer Pétur Örn Þórarinsson, formerly Director of Game Design Eve, was at the controls. At first he dons his armor – a pauldron and a breastplate – displaying how light reflects off its surfaces. It’s the kind of Unreal Engine demo we’ve seen for years, with incredibly high resolution and a ton of realistic detail – not something you’ll find in older MMOs. Then he set out on a forest path, leaving behind a small patch of the Heartlands for his clan.
Accompanied by two player-controlled companion characters, the party stumbles upon mysterious Roman ruins, whose limestone walls recall the arches of a 2,000-year-old aqueduct. There, in the corner of a cupboard on the lower floor, were a pair of demons—human figures made of flies. Crazy sword strikes and shining spells clearly lowered her hit points (swarms of numbers were clearly visible on the screen, as in Borderlands), and soon the demon died. Laurarenson’s further exploration revealed a book resting on a bench upstairs. Upon reading the book, the text alluded to another, larger demon in the vicinity. While scouting the area, the demon boss is revealed to be a towering four-winged pile of scum that kills the party in no time.
These kinds of explanatory quests – small clues written in a book, inside a ring, or carved into the surface of a piece of pottery – will be the ones that move the narrative forward and reveal the secrets of this world to players. And where Heartland is elevated and intrinsically safe by divine light, the deeper and darker places are in Bucks Day It will be where the real adventures take place.
“We don’t intend to just like expanding overseas,” said Laurerenson. “Often, we want to expand inward, which actually makes the dungeons deeper. [Say that] You’ve been playing for four years, and then something happened to the world. Now you have a reason to come back […] Because there was this door at the bottom of the cell [that is now suddenly open] – or an underground lake that is being cleared […] Or a broken bridge. Something has changed, and now you have another reason to go out there and dig deeper than you did before.”
Image: Mainframe Industries
Image: Mainframe Industries
Image: Mainframe Industries
But while Mainframe boasts a deep seat of talent – including additional CCP Games veterans (eve online) , Blizzard Entertainment , Ubisoft , Rovio , and Remedy (Alan Wake) – There are still many unanswered questions about its design. How will the player vs player buy-in battle work, and what are the stakes in clan vs clan clashes? How will governance work – between players and between Mainframe and its community – even when thousands of players are vying to rule? Pressed for details, the developers couldn’t say.
“This is a social sandbox game,” Gunnarsson said, early on in the show. “Designed with human interaction and social gameplay at its core, we aim to offer our players some new and innovative ways to meet up with friends — and then hopefully some enemies — along the way.”
And while the game will be playable first on PC, Bucks Day It is also described as a cloud-based experience. The developers say the goal is to be able to play the game on consoles and mobile devices using “cloud gaming platforms,” according to the press release. However, none of these functions were shown during the short demo.
The next stage for Bucks DayIt is a large-scale testing period, Gunnarsson said, where the theories of the experienced team and technology will be tested. An alpha version of the game will be released on PC soon, and players are encouraged to sign up website And join the discussion about Mainframe disagreement.
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