Survarium, the game my brain insists on calling Survivavarium, is what the Stalker team did next – a massively-multiplayer, open world alternative to Metro: Last Light’s Eastern European post-apocalypse. It’s already a thing of ambient beauty, and after scarcely a year of development Vostok Games have sent out a first wave of invites to players.
Vostok have fired off about a thousand invites in the direction of Russian-speaking territories, and will open the game up internationally within the next few weeks.
“Our goal at the early Alpha test stage is to achieve no less than 200 players on servers throughout the day and night,” said the developers. “We understand that not all the invites sent will reach the players, so we will continue sending out the invites until we’ve reached the desired number of players.”
As testing continues, the developers plan to gradually increase the number of concurrent players on the server by sending out more waves of invites.
At the moment, Survarium alpha includes only a “primitive” version of its team-based PvP mode. Vostok plan to fine-tune basic movement, shooting and network synchronisation before adding new features in future updates. Thankfully, they’ve put together a handy list to determine what is and isn’t in the game at present:
Is
- The team-based PVP mode. Soon we will shoot a tutorial video to describe the key features of this mode.
- The current game version has only two factions in: Scavengers and Black Market.
- Radar in-game location. (Vostok Radar Station)
- 11 various weapons.
- Three sets of equipment per Scavengers and Black Market.
- Zone-based damage system.
- The draft version of user interface is included. We plan to modify and improve it in future.
Isn’t
- The co-operative playthrough and freeplay game modes.
- The current game version has the mechanism of faction tasks accomplishing and reputation development with the factions switched off. All the items of Scavengers and Black Market are available to buy from the very beginning.
- Mechanism of perks is switched off. Passive skills work, but not in full scope.
- Damage of anomalies and artifact search mechanism are switched off.
- In the current game version the close combat mechanism is not yet implemented.
The studio are keeping an alpha testing diary to track their progress, so check back there for a better idea of what’s coming.
Team-based PvP is hardly the most progressive aspect of this really rather unique MMO, but I’m still hoping to grab an international invite in a couple of weeks’ time. How about you?
Thanks, VG247.