At the end of 2025, we recently posted this community update in our Discord.
It has come to our attention that people want information to be shared in places other than Discord, so I am reposting it here:
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It’s time to have a chat about the future of Everstorm.
The past year of development has been a VERY challenging workload for our team.
We have been pouring ourselves into this company the entire time.
This project always was and still is intended to be the beginning of an entire fictional universe, and this first title would be followed by endless iteration on the world we are creating.
When we began this journey in February 2020, our team set out to utilize Epic’s retired Paragon characters to develop a totally unique top-down MOBA experience with roguelite upgrades.
In a world where big AAA companies continue to perfect established genres, we believe the role of indie developers is cutting-edge gameplay innovation and wild creativity.
We believe indies should be trying out the crazy ideas that AAA companies are afraid to touch.
But that creative game development comes at a cost: experimentation and iteration.
Bringing truly unique game ideas to life means trying new things. Lots of new things.
And every single time we try new things, we discover new game design challenges, opportunities, and ideas.
That’s why over the past 6 years, Everstorm’s core loop has taken MANY different forms.
At first, Everstorm was initially called Project MOBAR, and it was going to be a MOBA Royale.
… Then we took inspiration from Vampire Survivors and decided to introduce hordes of enemies.
… Then we tried to make it more like a roguelite and turned the entire map into a series of gated rooms that you had to fight through.
… Then we took inspiration from Dark & Darker and decided to make the loot permanent, so that it would be an extraction game.
Those design decisions led to a massive amount of “scope creep,” which means more features, more work, and a longer development time frame.
I’m not going to lie, this 6 year iterative game testing process has taught me exactly why AAA companies are afraid to invest in new, unproven ideas.
It turns out designing entirely new game genres is a very long and costly process.
I have some (possibly) disappointing news to share with the community.
We aren’t going to be able to make the extraction loop work.
Over the past several months, we have been wrestling with the reality that there’s a core game design paradox with the extraction loop that was going to take a nearly insurmountable amount of work to address.
The trouble with MOBAs in the extraction genre is that MOBA games like Everstorm are largely a stat check. By that I mean, if I have significantly better gear than you and I am a higher level, there’s probably nothing you can do to kill me.
In extraction shooters, players can always get lucky headshots and outplay other players.
But in a click-to-move MOBA, the player’s gear and level are just so much more important.
I am sure you have all experienced trying to kill a level 18 fed top laner while you are a level 10 jungler with no items.
While we were working on Everstorm’s extraction loop, this existential problem of loot power creep became impossible to ignore.
When people were extracting and keeping their loot and levels, it was basically impossible to queue them with players who didn’t have the same gear.
Other games such as MMOs have grappled with this problem for a very long time, and most of them have opted to use flattened stats in PVP or dynamic levels in open world content.
Of course, we could just flatten the power differentials in Everstorm so that you only barely get more powerful as you gear up, but if you do that, then there’s no sense of progression for your player if the challenge is just flat.
I have always hated games that flatten stats, because it basically means your item level just doesn’t matter.
… For Everstorm, our solution that we’ve been working on to deal with this power differential problem was to create 6 different maps and several different difficulties, then segregate players based on their character level and item level.
Players would have to progress through the maps, then unlock additional difficulty tiers that they progress through.
One problem with this was that we would end up having dozens of different queues, and it would be VERY hard, if not impossible, to populate all those queues with real players.
The second problem is that it’s just a huge amount of work to create all these new maps and progression systems.
Earlier this year, the dev team and I had a long hard talk about everything we need to do in order to make Everstorm into the Extraction MOBA Royale that we are dreaming of. I will spare you the details, but with our current development team, we estimate it’s probably about 2 to 3 years of work.
And if this journey has taught me anything so far, it’s that if we’re estimating 2 to 3 years, it’s probably more like 4 to 6 years of work.
But we were determined to make it work.
We decided to try our absolute darnedest to get an investor, grow our dev team, and make this hugely ambitious game.
Over the past 18 months, I travelled around the world pitching publishers and investors, trying to raise significant sums of capital to invest in our development so that we could triple the number of full-time developers on our team.
During that time, we attended several major global game industry conventions, pitched in close to a dozen “Shark Tank” style real-money pitch competitions, and had several dozen serious meetings with potential investors, including some of the largest and most famous game companies in the world.
All those meetings are protected by NDAs, but suffice it to say, I am confident most of you would know the names of the companies who considered investing in Everstorm.
The vast majority of the meetings were quite positive.
But the core message that really stood out to me in all of those meetings was twofold:
1) Most of the investors and publishers we met with were truly shocked at what our small indie team has achieved on our own.
2) Most of those same people were also continually warning us that Everstorm probably needs about ten times the resources and funds we currently have, and far more than they believed a first-time indie company would ever be able to raise.
So here we are at the end of 2025, and the game still isn’t ready to release. After countless meetings with investors, 3 verbal offers, and 1 written offer, we still haven’t come to a signed agreement with funding to ramp up our development team.
Our small, self-funded indie team is now getting close to 6 years of development on Everstorm, and I have legitimately spent my entire life savings on the company to get us this far.
I’m going to level with you, most people probably would have given up by now.
But we aren’t most people.
We aren’t giving up.
While our Discord has been largely silent over the past few months, I have been moving mountains behind the scenes to continue personally funding the development of Everstorm.
And due to a hell of a lot of hard work, insanely good luck, and possibly divine intervention, I am here today to reassure our community that I have secured enough personal funding to continue development with our existing team, without an outside investor.
There’s a catch, though.
We currently have a team of 3 programmers, 1 environment artist and modeller, 1 sound designer, 1 QA specialist, 1 video editor, and myself.
That team simply isn’t going to be able to make the full PvPvE experience we have been working on.
Instead, we are going to scale back Everstorm’s scope into a more clearly defined core experience and focus on making that really good, instead of making a bunch of half-completed, unpolished features.
What this means is that we are completely removing the extraction element of Everstorm until further notice.
Moving forward, we are returning Everstorm’s vision to its original roots: a MOBA battle royale with randomized roguelite upgrades.
The very good news is that this is genuinely almost done.
Almost everything we were still working on this summer and fall was for the extraction loop: professions, quests, more maps, etc.
All of that is being removed, and the only permanent progression in the game will be PVP rank, as well as basic Class Masteries and account-wide upgrades that you unlock in the main menu.
We will be hosting a formal playtest of the tighter battle royale mode at the end of January, and we are hoping to be able to set a serious and firm Early Access release date for 2026.
I sincerely believe this revised game loop will still be one that you will be able to enjoy with your friends for 1,000 hours.
Thank you for your continued support.
Happy New Year,
Murg