Ashes of Creation Apocalypse open beta date revealed

Ashes of Creation Apocalypse, a precursor to ambitious Kickstarted MMORPG Ashes of Creation, will launch a free open beta later this month with a 100-player battle royale mode, developer Intrepid Studios has announced.

The aim of Apocalypse is to "test key systems and infrastructure" for the main MMO, which doesn't yet have a release date. The beta will start with a battle royale, followed "soon after release" by 200-player castle sieges and a co-op horde mode.

If you play the beta, which you can sign up for here, you can earn cosmetics for when the full game comes out.

The trailer, above, shows you what to expect from Apocalypse. It's a colourful medieval fantasy setting full of fireballs, blasts of electricity and purple runes. The arsenal of weapons looks diverse, with players handling both big swords and elemental rocket launchers.

You'll have lots of spells and abilities to sling, including short-range blinks and giant ice traps, and it looks like it might have some light building too.

All those effects could impact performance, mind, and even in the trailer you can see a couple of frame rate drops. Still, it's early days, and Intrepid will hope to iron out the kinks as the beta progresses.

If you want to know more about the MMORPG, watch Steven's interview with the developers here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.