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Moon Beast Productions, a studio populated by ex-Blizzard industry veterans now intends to find an alternate trajectory for the ARPG genre. They have now secured 4.5 million USD in seed funding during their first round — with notable investors including Versus Ventures, Overwolf, and 1UP Ventures.
To be announced sometime in 2025, the upcoming ARPG will be a vessel of ambitious goals — and hopefully as genre-redefining as Diablo — according to CEO, Phil Shenk:
"Throughout our careers, we've always pushed to redefine genres. We were there at the start, helping to invent ARPGs with Diablo and Diablo II... we've consistently sought to expand what players expect from the genre."
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Moon Beast Productions wants to make ARPGs great again with their debut game
With the roaring success of Path of Exile 2 — which picked up a million players just with its paid Early Access release — ARPGs are currently in something of a boom. However, as great as it is, Path of Exile 2 is a highly polished experience whose Early-Access cracks start showing a flawed endgame progression.
Last Epoch — another competitor to enter the fold between Diablo 4 and Path of Exile — is also battling plummeting player interest due to a lackluster endgame. While these can be pinned to that common thread, it's also true that the core ARPG formula has not changed much since the first Diablo. Path of Exile 2 tries to introduce its uniquely tailored slower cadence, only for that design to fall apart in its frantic endgame.
Standing on this precipice, Moon Beast Productions is trying to find an alternative way to approach ARPG game design. From a game developer's perspective, it is a notoriously difficult genre to get things right in, but their team certainly has the advantage of experience.
While a modestly-sized studio — Moon Beast has some ARPG heavyweights doing the lifting — including some of the leading developers behind Diablo I, II, III, Torchlight, Marvel Heroes, and the undermentioned looter-shooter relic Hellgate: London.
How exactly they plan to go about it is not fully disclosed yet. As we mentioned earlier, the untitled game has not been announced in an official capacity yet.
However, a few clues on its ideation can already be gathered from Moon Beast Production's Twitter handle. The biggest highlight is a dynamic terrain formation (and deformation) system — similar to that in Noita — an idea that has never been explored in any ARPG.
No ARPG has yet attempted to create a fully open world with persistent player-created environmental changes. Moon Beast Productions' CCO — Erich Schaefer — explains that an open and dynamic world is what can take ARPGs in a fresh direction:
"For the past 20 years, we’ve dreamed of ARPG gameplay in more open, dynamic worlds. We finally have the technological capabilities and decades of design experience to bring those visions to life."
Stay tuned for more ARPG news and updates on Sportskeeda.
