London-based Illyriad Games Ltd. today announces the launch of Illyriad, the free to play strategy game.
Two years in development, Illyriad offers players the depth of gameplay expected of a subscription-based game, but without charges. Set in a vast persistent world, players take on the role of a ruler founding first a single settlement and later expanding their empire to encompass multiple cities and broader territories. The game is an evolution of the familiar city development and resource management model, and adds features such as spies, theft, assassination, trade, and diplomatic relations to give the player the freedom to become the sort of ruler that they want to be.
“We started building the game two years ago,” explains Illyriad Games’ founder, James Niesewand, “very much as a game that we could get really excited about as players. We wanted an MMO empire-building game that could be played without downloads or plugins, that was set in a persistent, non-resetting sandbox fantasy world with a proper geography, the highest quality text and graphic content, that had a genuine diversity of game-play options and that didn’t treat its players like ATMs. We didn’t think it was too much to ask, but couldn’t find any free-to-play games out there that fit the bill – so that became our mission.”
“The first version of Illyriad went live a year ago, allowing us to test the game with live players. And through that later development phase we added more and more features, and upgraded the graphics. Now we have finally reached the stage where we are happy to announce the game and to start to promote it, but that isn’t to say that the game is finished. As a persistent, on-line game, we will continue to add new features, content and expansion packs. We also have further art updates in production, and a really exciting new feature list to release over the next few months.”
About Illyriad
Illyriad is a browser-based Massively Multiplayer strategy game, in which players take control of cities, engaging in city-building, quests, diplomacy, warfare and trade. Developed by London-based Illyriad Games Ltd., Illyriad went live in 2010 and was officially launched on May 16th 2011.
Illyriad is free to play now at the official website, and new feature releases will be announced in the near future.
