I think I may have mentioned Das Tal (that’s German for “The Valley”) on the site before. If not, here’s the skinny: it’s an open world, sandbox MMORPG that is primarily focused on Arena PvP, being developed by German (natch) indie studio Fairytale Distillery. The game has been in development for a little while now; it hit Steam Greenlight back in August of 2014 (and was successfully Greenlit thereupon), and was even graced with a $130,000 funding infusion in June of that year.

Here’s the basic premise of the game:

We will throw you into a dark fantasy prison valley. You start each game with nothing but your wits and your PvP skills. Over the course of weeks and months you will explore this world, grow stronger and learn to survive.

Hundreds of players will join you in the valley. Amongst them you will find friends and allies to form a clan. Start building your own settlement and empire whilst competing with rival clans.

In a completely player-driven economy, your influence and income will grow through diplomacy and warfare. You will strive to break free of your chains, defeat your captors and emerge victorious from your exile.

That was taken, by the way, from the game’s recently-launched Kickstarter campaign; Fairytale Distillery are looking to add €50,000 to finance further development on Das Tal:

Is €50.000 too little money to create a game of this scope? Definitely. But you’re not alone in funding the game. With your Kickstarter contribution you demonstrate to our existing investors that Das Tal is both an awesome game AND a viable business venture. They will match your funds and we will have the full budget needed to get the game released.

The Kickstarter campaign’s base goal will fund serious work on our current weapon and armor sets. Each will receive new combat abilities, with unique animations, visual effects and sounds. We’ll also create dozens of new items for you to craft and use, including weapons and armor. There will be a huge variation of new environment assets that will allow us to create bigger and better game worlds. We will also add NPC monsters, mob spawns, resource spawns and numerous unique locations to fill those game worlds.

Artistically, the game is somewhat similar to Ultima Online, which is listed among the inspirations for it:

Don’t be thrown off by the desert in all of these images; Das Tal will evidently offer a few different terrain types and biomes.

To keep things interesting, Das Tal employs a similar conceit to Crowfall to give them a means of changing the game world at regular intervals. That is to say, there will be periodic apocalypses:

The feeling of exploring new places and experimenting with new systems is very special. Constantly changing worlds allow you to experience this feeling time and again. Das Tal has been designed to support hundreds of semi-randomly generated worlds at the same time. Each of those worlds is unique in both geography and rule set. When you first start in a new world you will know nothing about it. You will have to explore, learn about its dangers and find out where to settle down.

Game worlds in Das Tal are always time-boxed. That means that they will run for a set duration (around one to three months) and then end in a massive event.

Pledging €40 (about $46 USD) is the minimum spend to get a copy of the game when it is finished; beta access unlocks at €50 (and will jump to €60 when the Early Bird slots are all taken), and alpha access at €100. Or, if you want to jump in and start playing now, you can pledge €175 and be done with it.

Fun Fact: Das Tal is one of the first projects to be launched on Kickstarter’s just-opened German portal.