MMO on Steam wanted to turn you into a drug lord like in Breaking Bad – What happened to “Identity”?
Similar to Second Life, the indie MMO Identity wanted to take you into a realistic world and make you a drug lord there. It started in Early Access in 2018, but then disappeared from the scene. Where is the ambitious game today?
What is Identity? The MMO wants to be a game and a life simulation at the same time. Similar to the then successful Second Life. Identity throws you into a world that is supposed to be very close to the real one and is located in a fictional America.
Unlike what you are used to from MMOs, you don’t meet orcs, elves or dwarves, but people who walk through cities, do their job and buy houses.
Identity is also based on the real world when it comes to gameplay:
- You can either join the gangsters or the police. This is especially important for the PvP aspect of the game.
- You should also be able to choose professions and then continue to improve in them. In addition to normal jobs such as cooking, there is also the drug dealer and dealer.
- If you pursue the latter, you start out in a small garage manufacturing drugs and work your way up to become a well-known drug lord. The scenario is very similar to the Breaking Bad series.
- Since you can also buy houses and simulate a life for yourself, housing also plays a role in Identity.
You can see a trailer for the MMO here, although it’s over 3 years old, it’s the most recent:
The progress to date is rather bad
What happened to the title? The MMO started early access on Steam in 2018. At that time it was still a Buy2Play title and very unfinished. The plan was to release Identity in several modules, which should expand the base game with new features. Such a system is known, among other things, from Star Citizen.
- Social life was integrated in the first module. You could explore a city and enter houses. The module was also what was available in Early Access.
- The SWAT module was supposed to bring more content besides PvP and shootouts, was planned for 2019 but never came.
- In 2020, a racing module was also supposed to come into the game, with which you would then have been able to drive vehicles, but that never came out either.
- The planned release in 2021 was therefore not adhered to.
- Instead, the developers spoke up again in January 2020 after 2 years of radio silence
- In a newsletter they say that there are technical and financial problems, but they still want to finish the game.
- Since this blog post there has been radio silence again, until a few days ago.
How is the game doing? Rather modest. You can still buy Early Access on Steam, but this has not received an update since June 2019. The title’s 553 reviews are currently set to “mostly negative,” with just 23% positive reviews.
If you take a look at these reviews, it quickly becomes clear that this is a mixture of false expectations and technical problems. The developers communicate on Steam that this is only a module of the game and that it is not finished yet, but that is exactly what is often criticized.
But other users write about technical problems and the fact that the game has simply not been updated for 3 years. Many of the negative reviews are sad about this, as even they see potential in the game.
Developer speaks up after radio silence and no longer wants your money
What does the developer say? On August 14th, the developer spoke up for the first time in a long time via his forum and gave an update on the MMO. And with that, a lot has changed. And despite the current chaos surrounding the game, the studio still wants to complete the game, but now in a very different way than before.
The whole game has now been moved to Unreal Engine 5 and everything had to be built from scratch. In addition, the developers have thrown the concept of modules overboard and want to bring a single, finished game to the market.
They don’t want your money anymore: Furthermore, the developer wants to take his game back from Steam and build his own launcher. They further explain in the statement that there were and are money problems during development, but you shouldn’t have to pay for them anymore.
“You guys really paid enough. You really shouldn’t be making any more purchases at this point until we’ve shown more updates to the game. After all the postponements it is time for us to prove ourselves again.”
The community manager also writes that in recent years the studio has had to accept and implement smaller projects in order to finance the game and that money from other sources will soon flow into the project. Until then, the game will be removed from Steam in the near future. You can read the entire statement at identityrpg.com read through.
What do you think of Identity? Do you give the game another chance, or is all the chaos surrounding the title too exhausting for you? Do you still trust the developer that the game will come out? What do you think of the statement that you shouldn’t buy the game? Write it to us in the comments here at MeinMMO.
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Reference-mein-mmo.de
