Grim Dawn developer Crate Entertainment is working on a new game called Farthest Frontier, a city-building sim in which you'll guide a small band of settlers as they struggle to establish a new town at the edge of the known world.
On the surface, Farthest Frontier looks to be a fairly straightforward medieval city sim, but the Steam listing promises a deep focus on details, including 14 different raw materials to harvest, 17 types of food plus ten food crops with "unique growing characteristics," and 50 different types of upgradeable buildings. Maps are randomized for each playthrough, and the "advanced town simulation" will portray individual villager's lives in real time.
Of course, faux-medieval village life wouldn't be complete without the threat of raiders and "old-timey diseases" including dysentery, cholera, scurvy, tetanus, rabies, bubonic plague, and frostbite, which I don't think technically qualifies as a disease but is mighty unpleasant regardless. Both can be switched off, however, and other difficulty options can be customized for "a more tranquil experience" and a vicious ass-kicking, depending on what you're into.
- Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
- This ancient city sim constantly simulates 1000 NPCs in a clockwork murder sandbox where you can poison someone's drink and leave 'confident that you've pulled off the perfect crime'
Despite being around for 14 years—Crate Entertainment was formed in 2008 by veterans of Titan Quest developer Iron Lore—Farthest Frontier will only be the studio's second game, following the 2016 release of Grim Dawn and two subsequent expansions. But that slow pace seems to work for it: Grim Dawn (which was announced in early 2010) is excellent, and Steam Charts indicates that it's maintained a remarkably consistent concurrent player count for a six-year-old singleplayer game.
Farthest Frontier is slated to launch on Steam Early Access later this year, and Crate expects it to stay there for 4-8 months, "depending on how much we feel the need to alter gameplay systems or add to the scope of the game before we're ready to call it finished." For now, you can find out more at farthestfrontier.com.
