Hunted Cow has achieved a great deal since the company was founded back in 2003. The company has launched a variety of online massively multiplayer gamers including Fallen Sword and Gothador. They’ve tried pioneered new business models, such as free-to-play gaming, years before the whole idea of freemium reached the mainstream games sector and they’ve grown from the two original Abertay graduate founders, into a developer and publisher with over 20 employees and over a dozen games on the market.
Since the earliest days of the company, Hunted Cow has been quietly working on one particular project: Eldevin. This is their flagship title, the one they believe in and the one which has, so far, taken almost eight years to complete.
Eldevin is the distillation of the company’s experience and expertise in online role-playing games. It takes all of the evolution and advances in online role-playing games and creates something new, in-depth, sophisticated and puts it all in a complex, detailed virtual world.
The game itself is written in Java. The programming language that all modern web browsers use. This means that Eldevin will run in almost all web browsers, across all different operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) on devices from a netbook to a laptop, to a desktop PC or Mac. This opens the game up and makes it accessible to the widest possible audience.
Eldevin is huge. Hunted Cow suggests there may be over a hundred hours of play in the game from launch day itself. The game offers an enormous range of options for players. There are 100 different abilities, 200 talents, several hundred different items, which can be collected or crafted by players within the game, by mastering up to 14 different professions.
There are over 600 individual quests, as well as group dungeons and solo adventures to keep individual players and parties challenged and engaged for months. The game also offers player versus player combat, including 5 v 5 battlegrounds and free for all matches.
Hunted Cow has just released the first gameplay trailer for the game, showing Eldevin in action:
We spoke to John Stewart, Hunted Cow’s Studio Manager and asked him about the game:
“Eldevin is our flagship project. We’re a small indie developer but we’ve been working on this game for the best part of eight years now. It incorporates everything we’ve learned from our previous games, such as Fallen Sword and Gothador, but adds a wide range of innovations and ideas we believe take the genre in a number of new directions. As huge MMO fans ourselves, our goal was simple – to build the best massively multiplayer online role playing game on the market. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished and we’re ready to find out what players think of the game. We want to see everyone in-game for the closed beta test in March 2013, which will be followed closely by the open beta and full game launch.”
The company has also opened registrations for the game’s first, closed beta test. If you’d like to participate in the initial beta, visit the sign up page and fill in your details.
This looks like it could be one of the largest games to come out of Scotland in the last several years. Eldevin’s open beta and release are due later this year. We’ll make sure that you’re kept informed first and foremost as Hunted Cow’s ambitious new project progresses.