Watch video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Ancestors Legacy was announced last year as a "historically accurate" RTS featuring Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and Slavs doing battle for dominance across northern Europe. Developer Destructive Creations announced today that the game will be released worldwide on May 22, and that a multiplayer open beta version, including all four nations and three maps with support for two to six players, will be available for all on February 6.
The full game will offer an "extensive single-player campaign inspired by historical events," with resource management and base building underpinning large-scale squad-based battles. Terrain, unit experience, and morale will all factor into combat, and a "cinematic battle camera" promises up-close views of burly brawlers having their skulls cleaved and guts spilled.
The new trailer and screens are intended to reflect the harsh life of medieval soldiers, and one of the ways they coped with that ugly reality, the studio said. "Prayers were very popular in medieval times, especially for the nations presented in Ancestors Legacy. Those were warriors who lived to conquer, so whether they were Christians or Pagans, they all needed deities to pray to when the battle was upon them. That's what we aimed for—not a prayer from an old prayer book, but rather words that people use when they try to 'talk' to their higher powers—when they get personal with whatever it is they believe in."
Previous Destructive Creations releases earned the studio considerable notoriety: Hatred was a bad twin-stick random murder simulator—Postal without the charm, basically—and IS Defense showed occasional flashes of technical chops and also Islamophobia, an effect amplified by assertions that studio CEO Jaroslaw Zielinski is a supporter of the far-right Polish organization Polska Liga Obrony. In light of that, I asked if the more mainstream-seeming Ancestors Legacy was a conscious effort to shed that unsavory reputation.
"No, as this reputation is plain bullshit," Zielinski said.
Okay then. The Ancestors Legacy open beta and prepurchases on Steam are both set to go live at 9 am PT/12 pm ET on February 6. A handful of new screens can be seen down below.