[NOW LIVE on KICKSTARTER] Exoplanet: First Contact news

Exoplanet: First Contact is a single-player, story driven action RPG set in a Space Western universe. Here, real and fictional technologies meet the cruel and unforgiving, yet romantic reality of the Wild West.

You are Jack Sharp, a daring adventurer, stranded on a dangerous, wild planet known as K’Tharsis. K’Tharsis is a former mining outpost, gradually becoming a ghost colony as the Antigravium Crystal Rush is over and the inhabitants struggle for survival.

Exoplanet: First Contact is a mix of an RPG and an action game. The player will decide how the story will unfold as he makes choices during the game that will affect the outcome.

There’s also a serious amount of action, with classic gun-slinging with futuristic weapons. You have access to a wide range of guns allowing you to snipe targets at long range, or take out targets in mid to short range with assault rifles or shotguns. There’s even a set of melee weapons when you want to get close and personal.

Jack might be not always act as a paragon of virtue, but we don’t just love western characters for their positive traits. Mister Sharp is not one of these clichéd Chosen Ones, destined to save the world with his band of mismatched henchmen and become the head of a secret service or powerful organization in the process. He is a smart-ass, charismatic scoundrel, whose selfishness often backfires on him, but he never stops looking for a big catch. Fortunately, Jack is bright enough and knows how to hold a gun. This fact, coupled with his natural wits and luck have saved him from any dire consequences of his precarious and impulsive choices, so far.

Little by little, K´Tharsis will reveal itself to you as you make your way through the locations and quests. As your actions influence the game, they also influence your environment. Through your decisions, entire towns could be wiped from the map, or they could reveal new paths and new opportunities. The planet changes with you throughout the game, enabling follow up missions in recently explored areas.

Exoplanet: First Contact has multiple large separate locations, which could be called levels. Each is completely free to explore and usually contains one unique biome or landscape type. There are also several secret areas and point of interests on each level. The concept is similar to Dragon Age: Origins or Borderlands 2, but with an even more complex terrain and many paths, shortcuts and secret areas.

Before stranding on K’Tharsis, Jack Sharp was the proud owner of his own prized spaceship. He loves his Crystal Betty more than anything as it represented to him more than just his home, it represented his freedom.

In the prologue of our story, his Crystal Betty was taken from him by force. Never being able to miss up on an opportunity to make some easy money, Jack had taken on a mission to deliver “geologists” with military implants to a smugglers’ den. Once the mission was complete however, they shot him in the back and dumped him on K’Tharsis.

Now, Jack is stuck on K’Tharsis, stranded, angry, and missing his Betty. He’s more desperate and greedy than ever, and will stop at nothing to get his precious spaceship back.

Developing an RPG the scale of Exoplanet usually takes two to three years. We don’t want our backers to wait that long, so we are releasing fully developed chapters.

The core gameplay mechanics are already up and running, and we have already completed large amounts of pre-production. This enables us to work with smaller iterations which we refer to as Chapters.

Each chapter contains a significant narrative sequence with clear goals, critical decisions and visible consequences. Each Chapter represents AT LEAST ten hours of gameplay, not counting the side-quests or the additional exploration you can do.

Exoplanet: First Contact is powered by our own proprietary game technology called the Sahara Engine. Using our own engine frees us from the limitations and reduces the amount of needles functions we encountered in more well known packages. This keeps the engine more nimble and perfect for what we want to achieve.

The Sahara Engine also provides the community with the tools needed to mod the game. You will be able to create your own adventures or add features. You can even create an entirely new game using the same engine.

All members of our international team are professional developers and modders from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Great Britain with a high motivation for creating a great game. Being gamers with lifelong experience, we learn from the best, we study the games we had the most fun with, and we’re trying to recreate and enhance this experience in Exoplanet: First Contact. We consider ourselves a part of the community, and developing Exoplanet has become more than a hobby, it’s a way of life for us. Our team (team is the key word here) is not a typical company, but a collective of like-minded individuals who aren't satisfied with the course modern AAA titles are taking in the RPG genre and instead we are challenging mediocrity to make a game designed with brilliance in mind.

As passionate gamers ourselves, we are greatly inspired by games, movies, and fictional worlds that changed our vision of the RPG-experience. We decided to mix the best of TESIII: Morrowind, Gothic, Fallout, the Firefly TV-series, and Dune universe together – these are the main ingredients that define the setting and the gameplay or rather the “feeling” of the game we are making. However, nostalgia alone is not a good foundation for a new universe. That is why we season Exoplanet: First Contact with some modern technology and our hard-core game design.