The Repopulation Worries

Rescued from the drafts folder…

Blatantly stolen from therepopulation.com because I don’t have any screenshots.

I was initially glad to hear that The Repopulation will be coming back. I splurged in a moment of weakness and bought it for $20 on Steam back in February 2015. I don’t remember why I bought it. I think I had heard some positive feedback about it, and I had heard also it described as being heavily inspired by Star Wars Galaxies, and I was curious to see what a SWG-like game looked like. (I’ve never even seen SWG, let alone played it.)

I played it for an hour or two, and I would give it a solid “meh.” It definitely had it’s roots in older MMORPGs, and it had potential as a complex sandbox. It’s one of those games you have to study before you can play it. It was such a throwback that it actually started out with a tutorial! And I don’t mean quests that serve as a tutorial, but an honest to god tutorial, like in days of yore, where the tutorial is directed at the player, not the character.

But the reason I didn’t like it so much is that the game had significant graphical problems and a distinct lack of optimization, so I didn’t think it was very playable at the time. It was like playing a game written in Visual Basic 6, if you know what I mean.

When last I heard about The Repopulation, they were porting it from the Hero Engine to the Unreal Engine. I thought that was a great idea. Then it disappeared off the face of the earth.

Then I heard it was coming back. I thought this was great news.

Until I heard how it was coming back. I credit this revelatory information to the MassivelyOP podcast 100.

Apparently they are transferring ownership of the game from Above And Beyond to Idea Fabrik, the makers of the Hero Engine. The speculation is that they will be abandoning the Unreal Engine port, and resuming operation as a Hero Engine game. It sounds like there’s a pretty strong chance that they are going to release the game in its unfinished state and call it a finished game.

If that’s the case, I would recommend avoiding it. Unless they sell it for like $5 or they make it free-to-play. And if they do make it free-to-play, do not buy anything.

Idea Fabrik will apparently have The Repopulation back online soon.

P. S. I played a few hours of Fragmented, the survival game spinoff of The Repopulation, and it actually wasn’t terrible. I was expecting a train wreck, so maybe not such high praise. If there weren’t so many other survival games to play, I might play more of it.