Welcome to The Daily RoundUp where we’re less concerned with being daily and more concerned with the news of the day. Today is August 16th and…

You should keep an eye on ‘Ghost’ especially if you have been looking for a new MMORPG.

Ghost is being developed as the first title from new studio Fantastic Pixel Castle, formed with the explicit purpose of crafting a new MMORPG experience under the leadership of Greg Street A.K.A Ghostcrawler and his experienced team.

Street, alongside a near decade long stint as a lead designer on League of Legends, spent five years as lead systems designer on World of Warcraft and was also heading the Riot MMO before he split with the company to found Fantastic Pixel Castle. Safe to say the pedigree is there.

A stream took place yesterday – on the channels of Josh Strife Hayes, CohhCarnage and JoCat – that showed off an extremely early work-in-progress build where the streamers played roughly an hour and a half of the game and asked Street questions. If you want to see the game for yourself I recommend checking those channels.

The main purpose of the stream was to get feedback for their experimental ‘Blue Zones’. These are instanced, rougelite inspired, PvE islands that players can take on as a form of randomly generated resources farming and level grinding. Made to tackle the problem of levelling zones that become obsolete.

Blue Zones saw the four person team head to an island to complete an objective that is somewhere on a reasonably sized map, ranging from traditional bosses to wave defence and hinting at a wider range. Along the way they would collect resources and defeat smaller camps, permanently keeping any level experience gained.

They believe they have a strong vision for the rest of the game but this separation of Red Zones (permanent areas) and Blue Zones (instanced and randomly generated) was untested and so they hoped to get feedback early before development got far enough along that it would be more of a problem if they had to try and fix it in post.

It was a promising stream showcasing solid tab target combat, a roguelite mode with good variety and systems, as well as an interesting vision.

It is clear that Ghost is inspired by many of the classic MMORPGs, namely World of Warcraft which is unsurprising given Street’s history and WOW’s impact on the genre. The goal is also to modernise things and address many of the issues you can find in classic MMOs while still keeping true to the genre’s DNA of a strong social experience that requires teamwork and cooperation.

Ghost remains in a significantly pre-alpha state so nothing on display was set in stone. In fact, the group went without a tank for the demonstration as the only tank class currently in development was not in a functioning state, as confirmed by Josh Strife Hayes and JoCat in the stream. The Blue Zones are also only a small part of the overall vision, making difficult to fully imagine the final product.

On a personal note, I am slightly sceptical but that has nothing to do with what I have seen of Ghost so far and more to do with the market they will be entering. Competing with games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 is a difficult sell no matter how good the title is by virtue of not being those games.

Cohh also mentioned that in some regards it sounds more MMO-lite with mentions of a single larger city and instances, drawing more comparisons to Destiny and Warframe. Street maintained that it was an MMO but did understand where Cohh was coming from.

All that remains now is to wait for the game to flesh out. As of now, they have been in proper development for roughly a year and expressed a desire to get the game out sooner than later as opposed to the 8-10 year cycle MMOs are becoming accustomed to.

It is hard to tell after such a small slice but Ghost shows a lot of promise and will undoubtedly be keeping people involved as they go so, if it sounds like a project you would be interested in, you can follow Fantastic Pixel Castle on X. They also post consistent behind the scenes videos on YouTube and have a twitch channel.

Typing X makes me feel icky…