See exclusive footage of ambitious simulation MMO Seed

Seed has the kind of ambition that makes me sit up and take notice: it's an MMO that aims to combine elements of colony sims like Rimworld, everything sims like Dwarf Fortress, life-management games such as The Sims, and persistent MMOs such as EVE Online. You're basically caring for and expanding a fledgling colony of humans, but when you log off from the game, the game will continue without you.

It's not entirely clear what our role is in all this—how we'll actually interact with Seed as players—so we asked Klang Games about that aspect at the PC Gamer Weekender. Here's Klang co-founder Mundi Vondi explaining how you'll order your colonists about—and how they won't always follow your directions to the letter.

As you can see in this exclusive Seed footage, your little villagers will leave important decisions, such as constructing buildings, up to you. When you're offline from the game, however, they'll be getting on with their daily routines, maintaining crops and so on, and interacting with one another, while their human overlord is down the pub or taking a nap.

You can watch our full interview with Vondi below, and it's worth it, as he goes into more detail about the game. There's plenty of new (early) footage of Seed as well, so you can see how all these grand ideas work out in practice.

There's a beta version of Seed expected late this year.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.