Back in February, Elodie Games teased a new co-op action RPG codenamed Project Skies. Today it officially revealed the game, and it's fair to say that things have changed just a little bit between then and now: It's called Seekers of Skyveil, and it's a «PvPvE fantasy extraction RPG» that blends conventional APRG mechanics with an unusual mix of other influences from games like League of Legends and Escape From Tarkov.
Seekers of Skyveil teams players up in groups of three «Seekers» and sends them out into a lush fantasy world on a quest for loot and treasure. But rather than a linear grind where you can come and go and run around as you like, in this game the clock is ticking and you can't just head for home whenever you feel like it: There's no town portal mechanic, so the only way out is through set extraction points—and of course if you die before you can escape, all that sweet loot is lost.
The game was initially envisioned as a PvPvE mode for Project Skies, which was initially intended to be a more conventional ARPG. But Elodie Games co-founder and CEO David Banks said the team saw much greater potential in it when they began playtesting a prototype. That led a small group of developers at Elodie to put together a more «fleshed-out» version of the mode, and after some experimentation the studio decided that an extraction mechanic would be a good fit.
«We playtested an early extraction prototype and never looked back,» Elodie Games co-founder and CEO David Banks told PC Gamer. «We couldn’t even extract in that first playtest, and our team was still scream-laughing and immediately wanted to run-it-back. That feeling is special, so we jumped in with both feet.
»On top of that, we have an opportunity to bring