Social MMO Sky: Children Of The Light is heading to Steam early access in April
"It took us a long time to get the PC build right," thatgamecompany tell RPS
Journey developer thatgamecompany have announced the PC early access release date for their social MMO Sky: Children Of The Light. Having already built up a substantial community on both mobile and consoles, PC players will now be able to join in on April 10th on Steam. There will be some special PC-themed goodies available to celebrate the occasion, too, including a Companion Cube prop from Portal, a Journey cosmetic pack, and double rewards for sending Heart gifts to other players.
"We're bringing Sky to Early Access on Steam so that we can implement all the refinements that will make the PC experience shine," the studio said on their website.
The early access launch will still include the full version of the free-to-play MMO, the devs go on to say, but they'll be adding features such as Steam friends, achievements, support for remote play, HDR and VRR support over time to ensure there aren't any hiccups.
Sky is quite a different proposition to most MMOs out there. While there are daily quests and seven different worlds to fly around and explore, either alone or with friends, it's mostly a game about forming connections with other players. You can send players gifts and messages, hold hands, give them hugs, or even stack up to eight people riding on your shoulders - and when I saw an early build of Sky's PC version back at Gamescom last August, thatgamecompany co-founder and creative director Jenova Chen told me the studio's main aim was to make a game that captured the same, fleeting feelings of connection and compassion as Journey did back in 2012, only on a much grander scale.
"We've been making games to connect people online at the emotional level," he said. "I grew up playing World Of Warcraft, so MMOs is my jam, but we could never afford to make an MMO game when we were a small indie studio." As time went on, however, Chen kept returning to the idea. "We thought, okay, can we try to capture that feeling that you are not alone and you belong to something bigger, and the people around you feel well connected? So that's why we stared to make this technology, and honestly, it looks best on PC."
The road to getting Sky onto PC, however, has been a bigger struggle than the studio anticipated. "It took us a long time to get the PC build right", Chen told me, mostly due to the threat of hackers who have repeatedly tried to exploit the game on other platforms.
"For a while, [hackers] are making millions of dollars out of our players by using bots to farm and sell currencies," he explained to me. "They would also make illegal builds of our game that connect to our private servers, and make builds where everything is unlocked and sell them for dollars. They also provided hacking services to give you items that you're not supposed to get. All kinds [of things]. We have over 15 million players, mostly active users, so it's a really good business for hackers."
To prevent this from happening again on PC, Chen says they've invested a lot of tech into their back-end service, with real-time response support to better catch criminals in the act. He describes their initial struggles with hackers as being "like an arms race" to try and shut down their fake accounts, but Chen feels confident now about the game's imminent PC launch.
"I'm pretty confident to say Sky is the world's most socially engaging and emotional MMO," he said. "We designed our game for MMO players. Like myself, I'm an introverted person, and I don't go to bars to make friends. I make friends in games, right? And we did a lot of things to protect people who are sensitive, and we did a lot of very interesting design to create a very non-toxic culture. You can almost say it's wholesome. So yeah, I think people who like to play games and interact with people online, we have a very unique experience."
Sky: Children Of The Light will be launching into Steam early access on April 10th, and you can still download its free demo while you wait to see what it's all about.