Welcome back to another week of our MMO Launch Spotlight, where we list the MMOs (or pseudo MMO’s) that launched throughout the week. This week we saw some peculiar pals mark their early access launch with a bang, and long awaited indie gem Ravendawn made it to a very healthy release. Let’s check out what launched this week.
Ravendawn
Long have we followed Ravendawn on our Indie MMO Spotlight, and it seems that the perseverance of Tavernlight Games has paid off handsomely with the launch having commenced on January 16th, 2024. While the game has experienced general launch woes, the team has been working on reducing ping and fixing connection problems as they arise.
This 2D sandbox MMORPG lets you build a house, farm, customize your character by mixing and matching archetypes, and has a fully realized player driven economy. Ravendawn is shaping up to be a fan favorite with their community bustling with excitement in the official Ravendawn Discord.
Familiars.io
Described as a “little MMO” Familiars has released on Steam January 19th, 2024. The game has been available directly on their website at Familiars.io but Clay Loam, the creator of the game, has released this pixel pokemon-esque pet collector on Steam to diversify their audience. The game is a hobby project and completely free, and the description on Steam doesn’t really take the game all that seriously.
However, the combat is turn-based, the leveling is fast, and there’s PvP for those that want to really dive into the nature of their familiars. As the game is not aiming to make any money off you, there’s really nothing stopping you from jumping in to see what it’s all about. Give it a shot on steam or on their official website.
Xanadu Land
If you’ve wanted a bullet-hell MMO, then it looks like Xanadu Land might be right up your alley. This Early Access title by BlackIsland Studio (not to be confused with Black Isle Studio) released onto Steam January 17th,2024 and has garnered a very positive rating so far. Xanadu Land participated in Steam's Next Fest in October of 2023, and since then, development has picked up to the point where they believe that the game will hit a final release state in several months.
Xanadu Land is a free to play game with a ‘no-pay to win’ cash shop in game, and you can play cross platform between PC and Mobile (though the game has yet to list on western mobile stores but shows available on Qoo App). You’re tasked to team up alongside other heroes and take out BOSSes, in a fast-paced arcade style shoot’em up where death is just part of the fun to start all over again. The unique boss-focused battles are certainly a nice change of pace for MMO players looking for something extremely action oriented.
Palworld
Palworld is one of those titles that fits more closely into the “mmo-lite” category. The game released into early access across multiple platforms on January 19th, 2024. The game is primarily an online co-op game with the maximum number of players encountered being 32 players on dedicated servers. Palworld has been described as “Pokemon with guns”, and the team at Pocketpair believes that the game will be in Early Access for about a year before full release.
As a survival style monster collector, players will capture mounts, build structures, force your pets into labor, breed some monsters, and explore some dungeons. As a multiplayer survival title, Palworld sure seems to hit the right spot with a lot of players, with a very positive review score on Steam. The game has launched on PC and Xbox, and is listed as part of Xbox Game Pass, so if you’re a Game Pass subscriber, it won’t cost anything additional to jump in and give this Pal picker a shot.
