Today we are pleased to announce our first expansion to the game, OrbusVR: Reborn. More than just a typical MMO expansion, however, we are going back and re-imagining the entire game based on your feedback during Early Access to make it even better. New art, enemies, mechanics, disciplines, activities, and more all await you. And best of all? It's a free update for everyone who owns the game!

The Promise of Early Access

When we embarked on the mission to create the first room-scale VRMMO, we knew that we couldn't do it without your help. That's why we held a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds and to start gathering input as soon in the process as we could. It's also why we chose to launch the game into Early Access even though it wasn't yet the fully completed vision of what we wanted it to be. We knew that even if it was a little rough around the edges, a community would form around the game to help push us forward toward what we all wanted to see.

To us, OrbusVR: Reborn is the fulfillment of that Early Access promise. You provided us with additional resources by purchasing the game, and we've invested those resources into creating an amazing team of artists, sound designers, writers, and programmers that can help us really bring our plans to fruition. I can't tell you how nice it is to create a whole zone with our own assets instead of just relying on what we can find available from 3rd party sources.

As such, this update represents our transition from being an Early Access title into being a fully-launched game. And that's why we're releasing it for free to everyone who already owns OrbusVR -- you helped us get this far, and you helped us make this possible, and you should share in the reward for your efforts!

It's All New!

Although we're calling this our first expansion, in a lot of ways it's more akin to a complete overhaul of the game. There won't be a single location in the overworld that remains the same. And this isn't just putting a new coat of paint on things, either. We've re-designed the entire landscape of the world to be more interesting and exciting for you to adventure in. There's also a 20-year time-jump involved story-wise, so a lot of the NPCs in-game will have aged, and many locations have changed drastically as well such as Highsteppe.

Part of the reason for this new design is that we've learned an incredible amount about how to make a VRMMO. From what type of performance is required to make the game function smoothly, to the best way to make sure that the socialization that our game is known for happens all the time instead of just at the early levels. We think that overall, you're going to find this a better experience and we can't wait for you to try it out.

Of course in addition to all of that, we're bringing totally new things to the game as well. Four new Battle Disciplines and a new Crafting Discipline. Completely new enemies with enhanced behavior and tactics. New dungeons and raids. New activities including dragon pet racing, public events in the overworld, and airship adventures for your party. Revamped opt-in World PvP and PvP Battlegrounds. And a level cap increase from 20 to 30. There's going to be a whole lot of new things to do and see, even if you've played OrbusVR for hundreds of hours already (and many of you have!)

Keeping What Works

Of course, the best part about all of this is that we also get the advantage of keeping what's working really well in the current game. We'll still have the shard dungeons system with mutations. The transmog station, Fellowship hall chest, and mounts? Oh yeah, those are definitely coming along. And of course your existing characters will all be making the transition to this new world (although you'll probably want to update their look with our new avatar customization). It's basically like we're re-modeling the house, but that goes a lot faster when you have a solid foundation and frame already in place.

Some things will be changing, though, from the current game. For example, the existing leveling dungeons and raids will no longer be in-game, having been replaced by new ones. The current Main Story Quest will also be replaced. The Player House system will also be getting a re-do, and focus more on upgrading your house rather than moving the location of your house throughout the world. We'll give more details on all of these things and a whole lot more as we get closer to launch.

I Want to Know More!

We're very excited to share this initial announcement with the community. We've actually been working behind-the-scenes on OrbusVR: Reborn for several months now, and it feels good to finally be able to talk about it in the open. However, at the same time we're still in the process of building the game, and as such there's only so much we can actually share right now.

Our new mini-site for the game is the best place to get all the info that we're ready to release right now, including some amazing new screenshots and a little video showing off the avatar customization features. Please keep in mind that all of the information and visuals we are sharing now are very much still in-development and subject to change as we keep working on the game.

We'll begin rolling out more details on specific parts of the new game in a series of blog posts over the coming months just like we did when we were working on the original game. You can look forward to deep-dives on dragon pet racing, the new battle disciplines, and more in the coming weeks.

Finally, we want to get you in-game so you can start playing and giving us feedback as soon as possible. Our goal right now is to start Beta testing the game with the community at the start of Q4 2018. And of course we're always interested to hear your questions or comments on our forums; we may not always be able to give a complete answer yet, but we want to know what you're thinking just as much as you want to hear what we're working on. I'll also be giving an in-game interview to answer questions from the community Thursday night, more details on that to follow.

A New Journey

This is just the first step in an exciting new journey for our development team and our community. We can't wait to go on the next phase of this adventure with all of you, and thank you for the support you've given to us and to the game thus far. Onward!