This article was sponsored by Rend.
"We spent 15-plus years on massive games, which is a fantastic experience and I wouldn't trade it for anything," says Jeremy Wood, CEO of Rend developer Frostkeep Studios. "But we wanted to see what the other side looked like. We wanted to see what we could do on our own with a more personal touch to game development."
Just over two years ago, Wood and his coworkers Mat Milizia and Solomon Lee quit their jobs to found their own indie studio, Frostkeep Studios. Together, the three of them have decades of experience at the likes of Blizzard, Carbine Studios and Riot. Going indie was an exciting change, and also a scary one.
"We'd always worked on these massive games that would take eight years and are still going on 15 years later," says Milizia, who is now creative director at Frostkeep. "So, we thought we would do something a little smaller. For a long time it was just three of us in a room."
They wanted to make a survival game, but they also wanted to leverage their love of and experience with MMOs. Eventually they hit on the idea of a survival game about building communities, and Rend only snowballed from there.
"We hit a point where we could either make the game with a very small team and compete in the mid-tier survival market—and I think there's nothing wrong with that plan, it would've worked great—or build a team and compete in the top-end, even dipping into the MMO genre a little bit," Wood says. "And ultimately we got feedback that said 'we want to play that game,' so we decided let's do it. We pushed our launch plans back basically a year and said 'let's make this thing huge.'"
Rend grew into a 60-player, faction-based survival game where sagas or matches last a month. You join one of three 20-player factions and fight for resources and territory in the treacherous proving grounds. You build bases, tame beasts, capture control points, conquer dungeons, unlock abilities, craft equipment, level skills, and plenty more, all for the sake of offering spirits to the great tree Yggdrasil at the center of the proving grounds so that you and your faction can ascend to Valhalla and join the Norse gods in battle.
To support their expanded vision, Wood, Milizia and Lee went recruiting—the studio is now 17 strong—and assembled a "ninja force" of veterans, many of whom have also backgrounds in building MMOs. Which worked out well, because using the strengths of MMOs to make up for the weaknesses of survival games is integral to Rend.
"I've played a ton of survival games, and it's always the same story," Milizia says. "I'd build this base and build all this stuff, and then it all gets destroyed at four in the morning and I didn't even get to experience or play with any of it. I'd get a couple magical moments where I'd actually get to play with this stuff and it would be this crazy moment, but they were super few and far between. We started talking about the problems we want to solve in the genre—what kinds of games play well with survival? And we were all big into MMOs."
From the complexity of its skills to the scale of its battles, Rend's MMO DNA is plain to see. But more than anything, what Frostkeep's MMO background contributed was a focus on social elements, which dovetailed perfectly with their initial focus on community, and which really sets Rend apart from other survival games.
"These games are fun if you have a group of people to play with," Wood says. "But most people jump in and play solo or with one buddy, and they can't possibly compete, and there's no incentive for these larger communities to allow players in. So the plan from the beginning was to let us form these communities and give everyone that social experience. Which comes with a host of different problems that we have to solve, but it becomes a very unique space that doesn't feel like other survival games.”
"I knew we had hit that when I was sitting at home working and my wife logged onto a new server. And within 10 minutes I'm just listening to them on Discord, and it sounds like an MMO guild. They're all working together, assigning tasks, joking and forming bonds, all within 10 minutes. That was the goal, to establish that feeling for every single player. That's what we can bring to the genre."
Rend is now available on Steam Early Access. You can find more information about Rend on its official site.
