Agents of Chaosa new autobattler royale game from Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield, launching its private alpha test today.
Games from startup studio popular There has been a lot of interest since it was announced at Gen Con 2024. More than 20,000 players have signed up for 1,000 seats in the alpha test. To meet the demand, Popularium will increase the number of alpha seats to 5,000 for the initial launch of the alpha, and they plan to expand the Alpha beyond 10,000 players in early 2025.
“We are overwhelmed by the response to the Alpha announcement,” said Arka Ray, president and CTO of Popularium, in a statement. “The number of players who want to join the alpha and experience Richard's vision has been more than 20 times greater than we expected. And we still receive hundreds of new applications every week. We expect more than 30 thousand applicants by the end of the year. The team is working through the holidays to accommodate as many players as possible in this early phase of the Alpha. We want all applicants to have the opportunity to experience Chaos Agents as soon as possible.”
To prepare for this rapid expansion, Popularium launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Republic platform. The campaign was highly enthusiastic and then oversubscribed within six hours of its public launch.
The Popularium initiative on Republic gives the public the opportunity to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the rapid closure of the campaign to players and fans of Popularium co-founders Garfield and Jonathan Bankard (co-creator of Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Command and Conquer) who wanted to directly support development their next original game.
“This is an exciting time for Agents of Chaos,” Garfield said in a community Q&A at the launch of the Alpha and crowdfunding campaign of Chaos Agents on Republic. “The game is being well received by players, much more than I expected at this early stage. There are so many different types of gameplay that we want to build into Chaos Agents, and thanks to the community and the technology we've built, it's becoming clear what we can and should be. building There's no more exciting time to develop a game when it's clear that players are enjoying it, but at the same time the possibilities for improvements seem endless.”
Multiplayer game forever
The Alpha Launch follows the announcement that Popularium has committed to the “forever multiplayer game” model for Chaos Agents. Through the use of dedicated servers and its proprietary Chaos cloud game engine, Popularium intends to ensure that Chaos Agents is a multiplayer game that cannot be killed or taken offline.
Players are expected to always have a way to play the game with the unique superheroes around the world that they have recruited to their team. Garfield and Ray said that the positive response from this release has helped generate additional interest in the Chaos Agents Alpha campaign and crowdfunding.
In Chaos Agents, the first game of the “autobattler-royale” genre, players coach and lead a globally unique superhero – their Chaos Agent – to victory in an epic battle royale against dozens of other agents.
The player trains and empowers their hero through deep, strategic card play similar to Garfield's legendary games, such as Magic and Keyforge, and then sits back and watches as the their agent going into battle, preparing for the next round of renewal. Each agent is globally unique – which means that only one player in the world can play with an Agent at a time and become a global expert on that agent.
“Evolving and creating new species is just so much fun,” Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents, said in a statement. “All of us at Popularium have worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone that started as small dreams that have impacted many more players than we originally hoped. We are trying something similar to Chaos Agents – to bring the genre of autobattler games to many more people through the authentic format of battle royales. The advantage we now have is that our community is involved early in helping us polish this uncut gem into a brilliant, bright diamond through their play. and now investments that allow them to own a piece of Popularium.”
Chaos Agents plans to extend its alpha at the end of January along with the Second Chaos World Championship, and plans to extend the alpha potential each month before entering Early Access at the end of 2025. Players can register for the alpha at popularium.com and request priority access by joining the
Chaos Agents Discord Server.
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