I’ve been around CipSoft for around twenty years, having been firmly invested in their fantasy MMORPG, Tibia, since I was a young teenager. That’s a game that debuted in 1997, and it’s still going strong today, but in recent years, the team has been marketing something entirely new: Persist Online.
This open-world, post-apocalyptic MMO comes as Tibia prepares to celebrate thirty years on the market. On paper, Persist Online is poles apart from Tibia in almost every way, but I caught up with CipSoft’s Benjamin Zuckerer to learn exactly why it aligns perfectly with the company’s decades of DNA.
Persist Online Could Only Be an MMO
Persist Online is a unique cel-shaded MMO set in the midst of a brutal zombie apocalypse. It features an open-world environment with deep granularity, as every building you see can be entered. It almost has an extraction loop, with players needing to leave their safehouse, venture into the dark beyond, and bring back the spoils of their adventures to grow their characters.
It’s a PvPvE title that encourages players not to fight alone, but to always be wary of other users. The multiplayer mechanics are front and centre in Persist Online, with CipSoft empowering users to form guilds and conquer areas of the map to earn critical resources faster than the competition.
Given how far it is in concept and appearance from Tibia, I asked CipSoft’s Benjamin Zuckerer how it fits into the company’s ethos:
Creating living online games is what CipSoft is about. That is the thread that runs from Tibia to Persist Online. We did not sit down and ask ourselves whether this should be multiplayer. A persistent, shared world is what we know how to build and what we care about.
The experience we wanted only exists when a lot of real people share the world with you. Hundreds of players on one world at the same time, writing and experiencing their own stories. The danger has to be human. A scripted enemy you can eventually learn, but you can never fully predict another player.
That unpredictability is exactly what keeps the world feeling alive, and it matters more than ever today.
Persist Online is an indie title at heart, as CipSoft has no investor or publisher backing, and it’s being funded by the success of Tibia, the thirty-year-old MMORPG that still has thousands of concurrent players at any given time.
Zuckerer explained that the community is the beating heart of Persist Online, and in the years that the game has been taking shape, it’s that concept that has kept things moving:
A good multiplayer game can only be developed together with the community. That is why we run playtests repeatedly, even before Early Access. In the end it is the players’ game as much as it is ours.
Our main focus has been making character progression more intuitive, more consistent, and more rewarding, while giving players more control over how they develop their character and gear. Crafting and upgrades in the Safehouse are faster and cheaper now, elite enemies are tougher with mutated variants and elemental effects, and we’ve added daily faction quests for more variety.
The road ahead is gradual and community-driven. Bigger tester groups, longer sessions, and step by step toward alpha, beta, and Early Access. We will get there one test at a time, with the community involved the whole way.
Persist Online has been in production, in one way or another, since before the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced in 2020. It is being assembled by a team dedicated to the notion of the MMO, and by lovers of titles like DayZ, Rust, and Escape from Tarkov, which explains the core gameplay loop somewhat.
Those games are built on tension, and that’s no different for Persist Online:
That tension is really where Persist Online was born. We wanted a persistent world where you keep your progress, but where you still feel that thrill of wondering what will happen when you leave the safety of the Stronghold and venture out into the world. The zombie apocalypse setting fit that idea perfectly.
The setting grew out of the design, not the other way around. It looks very different from Tibia on the surface, and with the new cel-shading style it has its own identity, but underneath it is the same CipSoft idea. A living, persistent, player-driven world.
Persist Online will get a playtest soon, over on Steam, and users can sign up to participate now. Given CipSoft’s stock in the gaming space, I’ve got very high hopes for Persist Online and will be following this one very closely.
Let us know on the Insider Gaming Discord server if Persist Online seems like your kind of game.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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