The makers of last year's most ambitious MMO announce new medieval wartime game that supports 1,000 players at once

Anvil Empires is a new and highly ambitious sounding medieval strategy MMO from the developers behind Foxhole, the large-scale World War 2 multiplayer war simulator that left Early Access last year.

In case you haven't played Foxhole, it's a wartime MMO where literal thousands of players work together on a single server to win a war that exists in a single persistent world and lasts for weeks in the real-world. Like in real-life wartime, actual combat is only a small part of the operation, and players will need to take on different roles in logistics, base-building, and reconnaissance if they hope to best the other side. For example, battles can be won not only by leveling towns with artillery bombardments, but also by cutting off supply lines or infiltrating enemy lines to sabotage their infrastructure.

I give this overview of Foxhole because studio Siege Camp's new game is being developed in very much the same vein, just with a medieval skin. I'm sure there are other distinctions, but the core fundamentals are the same: freely build bases in an open-world sandbox, farm and hunt for supplies and manage resources, trade with other settlements in an entirely player-run economy, and make sure your army is well-fed, armed, and rested for when battles inevitably play out.

Anvil Empires takes place in the expansive and diverse land of Calligo, where three alliances vie for control over territory and resources. "Dark secrets lie hidden inside Calligo's primeval mountains, beneath its abyssal seas, and between grains of the very soil itself," Siege Camp says of Anvil Empires' mysterious world.

It's natural to be a little skeptical of a relatively small studio with only two prior games in its portfolio promising so much in an MMO no less, but again, that's why I bring up Foxhole. The studio has already proven it can stick the landing on a very similar concept, with Foxhole's overall Steam rating being "Very Positive" after five years in Early Access.

Personally, I vibe much more with medieval stuff than Foxhole's World War 2 setting, so I'm really looking forward to Anvil Empires. In the latest dev update, Siege Camp says it'll enter pre-Alpha testing in April, which I'll remind you starts tomorrow.

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After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.