I was balancing time between Nevergrind Online and other projects, but I would like to announce that I am completely focusing all of my spare time to the completion of Nevergrind Online! As with all game and software development ever, I am hesitant to point to a release date, but I will say that I am hopeful for a 2021 release.
Note that the version that previews Nevergrind Online on this website is an extremely early version that only included character creation, old artwork, and showed off the multiplayer chat room environment in town. That was all developed before deciding to target the release for Steam instead. After enjoying modest success with our first title, Firmament Wars, we decided that Nevergrind Online would be perfect as a distributed app on Steam.
Nevergrind Online will be a co-operative multiplayer dungeon crawler with up to six party members. It will draw inspiration from a variety of games including EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Phantasy Star, Diablo, and even Darkest Dungeon. The goal is to design a socially-oriented, challenging, multi-player cooperative experience for a group of friends. This is the kind of game you and your friends can play all night on a weekend while eating pizza and chugging Mountain Dew! If you don’t want to pull an all-nighter on a weekday while playing this game, then we did something wrong.
Nevergrind Online will be quite a bit different from our first installment. First of all, Nevergrind Online will not be a browser game. This time it is being developed with distribution on Steam in mind. So every nook and cranny of this game will be engineered for the best possible experience for gamers on Steam. The original Nevergrind only made money from micro-payments on bank slots. Perhaps that made sense for a browser game, but it’s a business model that is often leaves a door open to allow greed to taint the integrity of the game.
Frankly, we don’t think all forms of micro-payments are bad. For example, original Nevergrind made revenue by allowing players to expand the number of bank slots that were available. This is a great example of a feature that optionally expanded upon the game without tainting the game. This was a feature that I wish existed in Diablo 2! The bank space was so tiny and I wanted to save so many items!
We also have many more exciting surprises that we cannot announce quite yet, but we’re eager to make an announcement when the time is right! Until then you can join our Neverworks Discord for more updates!
