About

Primal Currents is developed by a small team of passionate developers and artists based primarily in the UK. Our vision for this game is to capture the inherent simplicity of the gameplay offered by the likes of Old School RuneScape, but transplanted into a complex, multi-faceted world of obscure lore, unexplained & esoteric systems, and classic RPG-narrative mechanics.

The tried-and-tested Tick-and-Tile system has been our starting point for the gameplay experience, and we believe we've evolved it into something truly special that can support incredibly intense, high-skill gameplay, while leaving room for a relaxed, socially vibrant atmosphere. We reject the "MMO-lite" trend of recent years, and offer an authentic and persistent multiplayer & open-world experience.

Our game is for fans of MMORPGs from days long past, and the spirit behind their intent: offering continuously engaging gameplay and narrative over a long period of time requires friction. That means interspersing high-stakes combat and exploration with downtime: maintenance of the practical necessities that make it possible to continue doing the former safely.

The world of Primal Currents is dangerous and mysterious, and our underlying mechanics are ambitious and experimental, but every challenge in the player's path can be surmounted with an intelligent or elaborate approach, whether that's doing it alone with abundant caution, or with the help of allies. Our game systems are inherently multiplayer-friendly, and we invite you to test them with us (and at a scale not previously possible during the Alpha stages), as we enter Closed Beta.

Throughout 2026, Primal Currents' Pre-Alpha and Closed Alpha stages have progressed to where we are confident in opening up the game to more of the public. Our brand new Public Demo allows you to experience the first moments of the game without creating an account or downloading and installing a client.

That said, we highly encourage all players to register for the Closed Beta, which is completely free to join. In addition, we don't sell overpriced "Founder's Packs" to gate early access. Acceptance into the tester program does require an NDA to be signed, as we must protect a build that is still very much a work in progress, especially on the audiovisual end.

At this time we are accepting all applicants in order to build our tester pool and to schedule our first server stress test. We recommend applying now to help ensure your involvement before applications close, although we will endeavour to continue opening the Beta to testers in phases over the duration of its lifespan.

Upon submitting and verifying your email address (check the "Join the Beta" page), you can expect to receive an invite to accept the Closed Beta Tester NDA, which also serves as our Terms of Service during this pre-release stage. Shortly after that has been signed and approved, you'll be invited to create a Primal Currents account. From there, a download and installation of our Game Launcher (for Windows only at this moment in time) will get you started on your journey with no further barriers to entry.

We are at a stage where we are unable to provide a definitive release date. The timelines will be heavily informed by your valuable feedback, and our development roadmap will be adjusted accordingly based on what comes out of this first phase of Closed Beta. Regardless, we aim to keep Beta testers constantly engaged with new content, adventures and mechanics to sink their teeth into on an ongoing basis as the game evolves ever more rapidly. 

Make sure to check back here in future for a holistic development roadmap for past builds, the present phase and our future plans. We will share more about the Game and World of Primal Currents over the coming days and weeks, including in-depth articles on our game design methodology, which will be hosted on our Patreon page.

Primal Currents is a free-to-play, or what we'd prefer to call "free-to-start", game. As mentioned above, the Closed (and eventually Open) Beta will be free, and that transfers through even after the eventual main release.

In Primal Currents, character progression is measured in the form of Skill levels, and when the game is in a much more fleshed-out state, a paid membership subscription will be launched, which upgrades your Primal Currents account's character slots (yes, that's right, you don't need to pay a separate membership for "Main" or "Iron" accounts) that allow Skills to be levelled beyond the F2P level cap of 30, to the planned-by-time-of-release level cap of 50, which facilitates access to far more content and game locations, which will expand vertically beyond that post-release, until the planned final and permanent level cap of 100. In a very similar fashion to games like Old School RuneScape, it's from that point onwards that the breadth and depth of content will expand entirely within those bounds of player Skill levels, in a way we believe can last sustainably for years and decades to come.

At the forefront of this explanation of our business model, we are pleased to state very plainly that this game does not, and will not, feature any form of microtransactions, or an in-game real-money shop: it goes without saying we don't offer any form of pay-to-progress or pay-to-win. We additionally reject standard forms of monetisation-supported game features. We believe that despite the best intentions of developers, paid cosmetics or "pay-for-convenience" options poison the player experience, as the real-or-imagined financial incentive on design decisions and game mechanics can't be ignored.

We do not seek funding in the form of a Kickstarter campaign, and you will see from our Patreon page that our plans and vision for Primal Currents are not beholden to an as-yet-unreached budgetary goal. The game will be kept alive and continue to grow and develop, and any support received from the community during that time can help accelerate those timelines and enhance the game further. Post-release, the maintenance and ongoing development of the game will be through membership subscriptions.

We ask players to trust that apart from this one caveat of the free player progression ending at level 30 (which is by no means the end of a worthwhile gameplay experience because we estimate our at-release game to offer hundreds of hours of gameplay within that scope), a subscription to take your character's journey in the world further beyond (come the launch of that feature by the time of release) will be worthwhile. Every single thing you earn and achieve in Primal Currents will be a symbol of the time you invest and the skill you put on display.

Primal Currents is developed for the Godot game engine, and our networking infrastructure is built upon Heroic Labs' Nakama.

In the times we live in, it's very normal to treat any new game release, particularly those of MMOs, with suspicion and a healthy dose of scrutiny: kickstarters, re-releases, clones, and the abundance of AI slop make that a very understandable stance.

Primal Currents takes a lot of inspiration from MMOs such as RuneScape and World of Warcraft, in addition to games such as the FromSoftware "Souls" series, Monster Hunter, and an indie favourite of ours, Wayward. We aim to wear that inspiration on our sleeves, while also staying true to ourselves in the belief that we have created a game we can be proud of: one that was put together lovingly, piece by piece.

It's for that reason that we intend to put together, both on-site and in-game, a growing list of attributions for the assets you see and hear in the game, none of which were generated by AI. We aim to make it clear where assets (whether that be 2D images, VFX, 3D models & animations, or audio in the form of music & SFX) were created in-house and thus bespoke for the game, and what was adapted and modified (in many cases considerably so) from both free and paid publicly available asset libraries. Where external assets are used, we stringently vetted and selected them to ensure that no generative AI was involved in the creation. You will notice the Public Demo does not completely shy away from the usage of more rudimentary or placeholder visuals; we put the gameplay and mechanics first and foremost, with the art & asset pipeline following steadily after it.

At the same time, we must also be transparent where the game uses open-source code and 3rd-party Godot plugin features, which we are not able to guarantee were created entirely by humans.

Our attribution list is by no means complete and is not ready to share yet. In lieu of that, we state briefly and non-exhaustively the creators from whom assets have been incorporated:

• ITHappy Studios: animal model rigging and movement animations
• Quaternius: human model rigging and animations, other misc. props
• AlkaKrab: select musical tracks
• TomMusic: environmental ambience tracks, sound effects
• Ch0san: select weapon & armour models
• game-icons.net: 2D glyphs and iconography
• flaticon.com: 2D glyphs and iconography
• Fonts: Merriweather, Cinzel Decorative, Grenze Gotisch, and IM Fell English