John Smedley, former President of Sony Online Entertainment has recently teamed up with Bill Trost, Patrick Rothfuss, Inon Zur, Joe Shoopack, Scott Maxwell, Dave Mark, and other industry veterans responsible for such titles as:
- Tanarus
- EverQuest
- PlanetSide
- Star Wars Galaxies
- EverQuest II
- FreeRealms
- Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures
- H1Z1
The product of this team effort is Pixelmage Games, a brand new studio, currently working on Hero’s Song, a 2D pixel art action RPG.
Hero’s Song is still deep in development, and the Pixelmage team has reached out to Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary for completion.
Playable as a single player or MMO game, Hero’s Song allows players to choose which gods will rule their world. This choice affects everything from landscape, to family trees, to the afterlife, essentially making the game infinitely re-playable.
Hero’s Song will be hosted on players’ personal servers which will allow hundreds of players concurrently.
The game offers an extremely wide variety of races, classes, personalization, and more; the choice of these things dependent on the gods chosen to rule.
The story of Hero’s Song will essentially be the same across every world (affected by choice of race/class etc), but the style of the land, the NPCs, and enemies encountered, and just about everything else is up to interpretation. The game is very much focused on storytelling and mythology.
Pixelmage Games is hoping to gather $800,000 in the next 29 days with multiple rewards to offer. Given the fact that almost 100 extra backers have joined the Kickstarter since I began reporting this article, they might actually do it.
The closest prospective release date for Hero’s Song, if they raise their money, is October 2016.
