Life Is Feudal Leaving Early Access On Nov 17th
Medieval crafting sim
Life Is Feudal: Your Own [official site] has been in Early Access since September of last year, and news arrived this morning that the full release is set for November 17th. We haven't checked in on the 64-player medieval sandbox sim for around 12 months so I've gathered information from some of the recent changelogs below. There's also a snazzy animated trailer narrated by Sean Bean, supporting actor in recent poo-tatoes flick The Martian.
An American friend told me that she knew someone who "couldn't understand why Sean Bean does his Lord of the Rings voice when he's supposed to be working for NASA". Yorkshire truly is another world.
Life Is Feudal's pitch is total freedom within a world that requires cooperation. It's Wurm and Blade (or Mount and Wurm if you prefer, but that sounds all kinds of wrong to me), an online game in which everything must be crafted from base components, and there's no single character build that can fulfill all possible functions.
The idea is that farmers are required to support masonry workers and carpenters, and warriors are needed to defend whatever the rest build.
"Will you play the part of a warrior, a farmer, an architect, or even an artist? Life is Feudal: Your Own presents an open world full of possibilities. Work with your community to alter the landscape and use modular building tools to erect realistic villages and cities. Craft the items needed to survive and enrich your life, and challenge other player in physics-based combat."
To prevent, or at least discourage, killing sprees, Life Is Feudal has an alignment system. You can read all about at this link, but essentially committing horrible acts increases the penalties you suffer upon dying. If opponents yield as you're fighting, finishing them off carries the heaviest penalty of all, which means it should be possible to keep your head on your shoulders as long as you back down when the going gets tough.
Updates have been coming thick and fast over the past month, and the most recent include the addition of a direct player-to-player barter system, reworked skill progression, and tweaks to plant and fruit growth, and animal breeding.
There was an RPS server at one point but it appears to have faded away. There may be players lurking in this forum thread - if you're playing or planning to play, it might be worth seeing if there's interest in setting up a new server with the locals.
And if you're wondering about the title (I certainly was), the Your Own subtitle is apparently there to distinguish this from an upcoming Life Is Feudal MMO, currently in development, which players of Your Own will "receive access to".