Last year indie dev team Ramen VR launched a highly successful Kickstarter to crowdfund an MMORPG called Zenith. Now the studio has announced that an early pre-alpha is on the way later this month for founders who backed the initial campaign.
The pre-alpha will be made available eligible backers on 21st March 2020, supporting Oculus Rift/Rift S, to begin with. As development continues more headsets will be added to the roster, with Steam VR and Oculus Quest planned for later. All the funding tiers from $35 USD and above are included in this pre-alpha. As this is a very early build Ramen VR does stress that many of the core features are still missing but it does still offer the first fully playable loop of Zenith.
Lauren Frazier, co-founder of Ramen VR notes in the video below that account creation won’t feature (that’ll come later) so players will be given pre-created characters. Also, the servers will only run at the weekends, with the pre-Alpha held for at least a month, possibly longer. There will be three environments for players to explore, the main Zenith city itself, a dungeon/cave type location and a larger grassland area.
A cyberpunk style VR MMORPG inspired by anime and JRPG classics, Zenith is an ambitious project to create a living, breathing world which players can explore, go on adventures with others, fight enemies and craft items. Players will be able to pick and customise their character and class to suit their gameplay style, all with full-body avatars – no floating heads.
The brainchild of Frazier and fellow co-founder Andy Tsen, who met during the Oculus Launch Pad program in 2017, they were only looking to raise $25,000 from the Kickstarter but went on to hit $280,075 from 3,415 backers instead. This allowed them to hit several stretch goals for even more content.
Ramen VR will be releasing further updates on Zenith over the course of March for those unable to access the pre-alpha. In the Kickstarter the team estimated a launch would take place in August 2020 so the pre-alpha should be a good indication of how things are progressing. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Zenith, reporting back with the latest updates.