The live service graveyard is starting to overflow, so former World of Warcraft designer Chris Kaleiki is taking an unconventional approach to his new studio Notorious' debut game: hope for a smaller playerbase.
"It will be more of a meager, smaller start, which is actually kind of what we want," Kaleiki tells GamesRadar+ in an interview. "We don't want it to be insane, too many players playing it, because we need to grow, and learn, and adapt, and build out the foundations as we go to accommodate more players over time."
When it releases in Steam early access next week, Kaleiki's online PvPvE role-playing game Legacy: Steel & Sorcery should appeal to fans of classic, ogres-and-goblins fantasy, as well as masochists, on behalf of its co-op survival and extraction elements. That's to say, several genre markers later, that Legacy's initial appeal might be a bit niche, especially with the world PvP focus.
"I think you've got to do this iterative crawl, walk, run strategy," Kaleiki tells us. "That is what our internal strategy is, rather than just go full-on sprint at the beginning."
But it's also true that "live service has been challenging," Kaleiki continues. "It's sort of saturated with so many different other live service games out there. To try to make a competitor to, say, Call of Duty or World of Warcraft [...] is really hard because those studios have what I call a moat protecting themselves. [...] How are you going to compete with that? Not to say it's impossible, but it's really hard to do."
More reasonable, then, is to set humble expectations and not plan for an unprecedented breakout hit like Marvel Rivals or Helldivers 2.
"I think for a startup, for a newer studio, for an indie," Kaleiki says, "trying to compete with a AAA, AAAA kind of game is going to be incredibly hard. I think it's better to do something like what we're doing, which is more of a AA space."
Kaleiki formed his own studio to make an RPG that plays like "World PvP: The Game" and feels like a mini MMO channeling "early Blizzard."
