moss

Polyarc, the studio behind the Moss franchise, announced a new competitive multiplayer VR game currently in development.

Polyarc isn’t saying much beyond that—we still don’t even know it’s name—however a look at the game’s concept art shows a definite influence from Moss‘ style and characters, including the Reader and a number of plucky mice heroes.

Although we can’t read too much into it, retrofitting Moss’ third-person platforming view into a multiplayer battle game may mean the studio is pursuing something very similar in feel to Moss, albeit with multiple classes and weapons. In the concept art we see a gilded Reader and a number of different mousey classes: a tank, archer, knight, wizard, and even some evil leafy dudes.

“It’s apparent observing the community of players out there and receiving some of our own feedback that there are a lot of gamers in VR who are looking for and want to play more competitive multiplayer games,” said Tam Armstrong, co-founder and CEO, Polyarc. “We are excited about this opportunity, as VR offers interesting considerations for multiplayer games. The ability to read the other player’s focus and intention as they move their head and hands are some of the elements that make playing games in person so compelling. We are looking forward to sharing what we’ve been working on and the fun we’ve been having playing it.”

Coming off the success of Moss and Moss: Book II, Polyarc says a competitive multiplayer is “something the team has been excited to develop since the studio’s inception in 2015, but first the player base needed to grow large enough to support multiplayer games of this nature.”

The game, which is still unnamed at the time of this writing, is set to run closed playtesting on the weekend of April 14th-16th. Here’s how Polyarc describes the first round of closed beta testing:

We’re working on lots of cool, new stuff and want to see what happens when we get it in the hands of real players. Each playtest will focus on a different aspect of an in-development game and your feedback will be important to help us make the best final product(s) possible. And we’re here to test the game; we’re not testing you as the playtesters. So please don’t feel like you have to do anything besides play the game. If you are having fun, we want to know! If you aren’t having fun, then we also want to know. And we will ask you all about every juicy detail in a survey at the end.

The studio hasn’t announced target platforms yet, however playtesters will require a Quest 2 to participate. If you’re interested in joining, signups are available starting today.