This article was sponsored by Rend.
Rend, Frostkeep Studios' 60-player faction-based survival game, will launch on Steam Early Access on July 31. It will remain in Early Access for six to 12 months, with Frostkeep adding new features and expanding on existing ones throughout. The studio will also be working closely with Rend's community to improve the game, as co-founder and CEO Jeremy Wood explains.
"Early Access players are going to have a strong voice in the direction of the game," Wood says. "A lot of times you see that fall off as games get into beta and full release, but we don't see that changing for us. We're not making this game for ourselves. We could sit here in a vacuum and make a game that we're all very excited about, but that doesn't matter to our community who's really invested in getting exactly what they're looking for out of a game."
"We're being as open and honest as we can," co-founder and creative director Mat Milizia says. "Here's why this is or isn't where the game is going. Here are our points, so give us a counterpoint. If there's strong enough resistance to where we're going with it, obviously we're going to pivot. We're not building this for us, we're building it for everybody else."
Players will not only be able to offer feedback through Steam Early Access and Rend's active Discord—"everyone there knows us, they're comfortable sharing positive and negative feedback," Wood says—but also experiment with the game itself through private servers. You can easily set custom rules for a server like increased experience or resource yields, and as Rend expands, more and more options will be added.
Frostkeep will offer a full-fat mod kit on the heels of the EA launch to enable players to create their own creatures, items, artifacts and biomes, or even brand-new game mechanics. Players will have the option to mod their server so that its cycle never ends, effectively turning it into a sandbox mode, or to remove the magical shields from faction bases to promote an even more aggressive play style. "It may not be our core experience, but we'll support it," Wood says.
Of course, player-made contributions are only part of Rend's post-launch agenda. Frostkeep is already working on heaps of new content, from expanded crafting and seasonal biomes to end-game content like dungeons and a perilous new biome. A big batch of content will be released in the first few weeks following Rend's Early Access launch, and there's plenty more where that came from.
Rend will launch on Steam Early Access on July 31. You can find more information about Rend on its official site.
