Just found out about this game...

grvmpybear

Is it still alive? Latest forum activity here is from 2012.

cirsyndic

It's on life support, theres like 20 guys playing.

Demensha

Originally posted by cirsyndic
It's on life support, theres like 20 guys playing.

^^ This.

Tho been playing since 8 months of beta and into release and presently.Been having a blast.

grvmpybear

Originally posted by cirsyndic
It's on life support, theres like 20 guys playing.

That's unfortunate. Wonder why they haven't tried the F2P bandwagon yet?

 

Demensha

Originally posted by grvmpybear

Originally posted by cirsyndic
It's on life support, theres like 20 guys playing.

That's unfortunate. Wonder why they haven't tried the F2P bandwagon yet?

 

There are plans afoot, only hope its enough.

Personally I don't see it lasting past this year but I hope im wrong.

Chuckanar

Looks nice.. I never heard about it. Of course i am not a huge fan of world pvp though.

BrownAle

A game that's mechanically superior to EVE at its foundation level, behind EVE in its "maturity" given its a newer game, and just about near dead population wise.

 

What this means is theres a lot of people who want to play but don't because theres not enough people playing, which leads to less people playing and more people leaving ect.

 

Game needs about 10k active players to work, and if it ever got that many players it would be a fantastic game.

 

If the game goes F2P ill probably not come back.  Sick of games taking the easy way out and going f2p, which leaves them no back up plan if that doesn't work and its shutdown time.

 

Game needs to go live on steam, been nearly a year since it was greenlit and still not launched there.  The residual population burst from the greenlight has evaporated, just about all didn't stay past the free trial.  EvE type game is a hard sell imo.

 

Anyway, its sad to see this game struggling after all these years. Open world terraforming and destruction and political metagaming is fantastic but you need people to make it all fun.

 

Don't see the game making it to steam launch, a good chunk of the already tiny dev team left to make a living wage, leaving a few guys to do all the work, lead developer even handles support tickets which is sad.  They need a buyout and about 50 more developers to take the game to the next level and make it more than a fantastic college project.

ShakyMo

It's a decent game, but unfortunately there aren't enough players.

The interference idea is really good. It's a good mechanic for stopping blob/zerg play, other mmos should copy it.

SpottyGekko

Originally posted by BrownAle

A game that's mechanically superior to EVE at its foundation level, behind EVE in its "maturity" given its a newer game, and just about near dead population wise.

 

What this means is theres a lot of people who want to play but don't because theres not enough people playing, which leads to less people playing and more people leaving ect.

 

Game needs about 10k active players to work, and if it ever got that many players it would be a fantastic game.

 

If the game goes F2P ill probably not come back.  Sick of games taking the easy way out and going f2p, which leaves them no back up plan if that doesn't work and its shutdown time.

 

Game needs to go live on steam, been nearly a year since it was greenlit and still not launched there.  The residual population burst from the greenlight has evaporated, just about all didn't stay past the free trial.  EvE type game is a hard sell imo.

 

Anyway, its sad to see this game struggling after all these years. Open world terraforming and destruction and political metagaming is fantastic but you need people to make it all fun.

 

Don't see the game making it to steam launch, a good chunk of the already tiny dev team left to make a living wage, leaving a few guys to do all the work, lead developer even handles support tickets which is sad.  They need a buyout and about 50 more developers to take the game to the next level and make it more than a fantastic college project.

It pretty much sounds like it's a dead game, all that still needs to happen is them turning off the servers.

 

I quite enjoyed playing it in the first year, but it's far too much of an EVE clone to survive on its own. EVE fills its niche extremely well, and no land-based clone is going to be able to rival EVE using the current technology.

The design of the EVE game world makes it massive, all other MMO game worlds are tiny in comparison. That's what gives EVE it's edge, and no land-based MMO is going to be giving a similar experience for many many years to come.

cirsyndic

Game was very fun with about ~1000 concurrent players on release. With the 10-20 concurrent players right now though... not so much.

 

There was a wild rumor in the community that the server lease ends this June, not sure if there's any truth to it, will see I guess.

Quazal.A

had completly forgot about this bad-boy

 

Just checked my acocunt was set up in sept 11..

Think im going to reactivate and see how it feels for 24hours

kakasaki

Wow, forgot about PO. Played for about 6 months at launch. It was okay but it just didn't pull me in. Can't remember excatly why. i know one issue was that it felt like I was controlling tiny insects instead of big mechs if that makes any sense...

BrownAle

Originally posted by kakasaki
Wow, forgot about PO. Played for about 6 months at launch. It was okay but it just didn't pull me in. Can't remember excatly why. i know one issue was that it felt like I was controlling tiny insects instead of big mechs if that makes any sense...

Yeah the game had some issues with its client and how the game was set up.  Its more of a 2.5d game than a 3d game.  For whatever reason they had issues with making characters larger than one land tile (despite you cant see those tiles.  So to compensate for the largest robots being just one tile large they had to make the lesser bots extremely small...though you can zoom in and they look bigger lol.

 

These issues arise again with terraforming and why you can make a tunnel or bridge with a pass underneath.

 

Its sad really, this game did a lot of things right mechanically and with game systems.  Was like eve but stuff wasn't as automated and boring...everything about the game was less passive and more active if that makes sense...combat was far more engaging with plant life that could be used as shelter but also die in battle, only to regrow. 

 

The death of this game occurred long ago when EVE pissed off a lot of its players and Perpetuum saw its first population boom.  The game was very new, very small, lacked any type of endgame motive and had stability issues with all these eve refugees. Many left but never came back.

Whats sad is that now the game is a hell of a lot better missing only the playerbase now that would make these endgame activites fun and worthwhile.

They just didn't have enough people in the past to make progress with the game to capitalize on the EVE refugees...and by the time they got those long term metagame foundations in game (mainly with terraforming and building bases wherever) everyone had left.  From there it was a steady loss of players due to low player base, which snow balled.

 

There was a beam of light when the game got greenlit...population spiked slightly...and some veterans came back to see which made the game active...but..they couldn't get the new player experienced remade and still haven't and still haven't officially launched on steam close to a year later...to make matters worse the small development team got significantly smaller...and well...if steam launch is on the horizon and a major developer leaves...that's not a good sign.

 

Anyway..it might not die...but im convinced that the life saving boost in population that steam may provide will be short lived, and they still need to wrestle with a  lot of issues that are inherent to its small client.

The game needs a complete remake regarding its client.  The game systems and mechanics are fantastic...its the client and lack of manpower that are going to cause any burst in population to trickle away.

 

Even more sad...IMO good games like EVE should be cloned.  Themeparks like wow shouldn't.  We need more games like perpetuum.

 

I stopped sub a few months ago, im going to wait and see if it even goes live on steam.  It has potential but the client and lack of players are a huge issue.  Also this type of game is a really hard sell...its not easy, theres no fast path....its unforgiving...and extremely complex.

 

Quazal.A

Gotta say it still looks stunning, yes the robots look silly small (smaller than i remember)

But like you said population is major problem, I logged on last night, trying to figure out what to do to find just 2 people on an Alpha island.. and just 13 people in the recruitment and 16 in trade channel...

SAD!.

 

But yes visually, i think it looks great, considering its lack of serious investment, it is complex, but they have some very novel ideas, i always loved the way you learnt how to produce better blueprints using kernals,

The idea like eve that you can buy game time using ingame currency is another im a massive fan of, where someone buys it using real money and converts in game, this to me helps reduce gold sellers and allows players to give themselves a legal perk up, but also for players who have wealth freedom to play game without subs.

More games should adopt this approach

But i will keep it installed, maybe popping back 1 a month on my free day to see if its finally cranked or started to regrow... hopefully the latter, will be a shame for a game that has all the right ideas to die but sadly its the fate of many mmo's one days favorite the next days server bin