COREPUNK Q1 2020 Update has the MMORPG Looking Pretty Good!

The last time I talked about COREPUNK was back at the beginning of December. They’d just debuted their trailer and people were excited with what they saw. For the most part, anyway.
The main issue people had with the game was the pace of the combat, but that’s a minor concern considering they addressed that relatively quickly.

Since then people have repeatedly asked for info regarding the game – and as of April 3rd, the team behind Corepunk have given us just that in their first “Quarterly Update of 2020.”
I’ll be the first to admit here, I love when developers release quarterly informational updates with what they’ve been working on, what they’ve accomplished up until this point, and giving us a general sense of progression.
There’s nothing worse than developers stringing you on for years while providing little in the way proof of work.

Artificial Core, the developers, revealed at the time of the announcement that the game would feature the holy trinity of class archetypes: Tank, Healer and DPS.
There would be “support” types as well but.. support classes are normally a hybrid of a DPS and a healer, so I’m not sure what that’d fit into.
However, instead of creating your own “character,” you instead chose from one of several already established characters, each with their own personality, weapon specializations and skill trees.
Yes, you heard that correctly – I did say “character.”
However, after extensive feedback from the community, Artificial Core realized that gender locking classes and characters was the wrong way to approach the game and would limit the freedom of who and how you wanted to play.
Thus, they announced that they would be removing gender locks from their characters, allowing you to not only create a character of either male or female genders, but also adding in a lot of customization options such as hairstyles, facial hair, facial features, and additional colors for skin, lips, eyes and hair.
I know this is important for a lot of potential players. Customization is integral to enjoyment for a lot of us and not providing us with that creative freedom is a recipe for disinterest.
Based off of the character models we’ve been presented with though.. damn, they’re looking good.

Talking about the characters in specific, they’re actually referred to as “heroes.” While initially it was announced that COREPUNK would feature 9 heroes total, there will only be 6 available during the Closed Beta test.
I’m guessing this is due to the fact that they’re focusing on getting a smaller selection ready for testing as opposed to rushing the entire roster and ultimately having them end up buggy or broken.
It’s worth noting that they did state that they have a lot to tell us, however they’ll go much further into detail during a future livestream.
Speaking of, Artificial Core have confirmed that their next stream will be taking place at the beginning of May 2020 – that’s just next month.
It’ll show approximately 15-30 minutes worth of new gameplay footage, with their next stream to follow in June, and the duration of June’s stream being several hours as opposed to a half hour.
They’re also contemplating allowing streamers to play the game and stream early-footage of it but in my opinion.. that’s a bad idea.
The last thing you want to do is let people into the game when you’re not even sure it’ll be in a playable state by the end of 2020.
Please don’t kill any hype you have for the game before it even has the chance to take off. While streamers are integral to increasing the popularity of any game, at the same time if the game isn’t ready.. trust me, streamers will do much worse than showcase those bugs.
And while that doesn’t apply to every streamer – you guys know that some of them will either just to troll or for those extra few views.

Interestingly, they’ve opted to adopt a buy-to-play business model, battle passes, and an in-game store. While they’ve noted that the store won’t feature pay-to-win items, I’m always very pessimistic when it comes to stores in MMOs.
Especially if the game isn’t pay-to-play. The reason that they chose to go the buy-to-play route was due to the team not believing they can survive or grow on a pay-to-play model.
That’s true – very few games can these days, with the only large-MMOs being Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. They also went on to detail the world – according to the devs they’ve built a large portion of the game world already, but there’s a lot that needs doing.
They’re currently in the process of designing the beginning areas of the game and that’s what they’re aiming to showcase in their upcoming livestreams.

COREPUNK is an upcoming MMO set in a post-apocalyptic world featuring an eclectic fusion of genres. It has a large open-world for players to explore, lots of PvE content and various PvP types ranging from Arenas to Battlegrounds to open-world PvP.
There are a lot of heroes to choose from and a lot of play-styles to therefore enjoy. They don’t have an expected release date currently but they are planning to at least go into Alpha testing before the end of this year.
However, as they mentioned, they’re also looking to allow streamers in before the Alpha is ready so who knows, some of you might be able to play it even before it’s in a semi-ready state.
I just hope, considering this shares a lot of similarities to Pagan Online, that it.. isn’t. Because while I initially found Pagan to be fun, it turned out pretty bad, relatively fast.

Also note: COREPUNK will be launching on PC.