MercurySteam has steadily been working on updating and reworking their MMO title Raiders of the Broken Planet ever since it launched last year. Beyond adding different campaigns to the game, they also relaunched it as a free-to-play title on August 23 under the new name of Spacelords. Along with the relaunch, MercurySteam also added a fourth campaign to the game, called Council Apocalypse. 

The free-to-play business model brings a number of changes so as to make the  game accessible to new players and a wider audience, but without the veterans losing out either. The changes bring about some interesting methods being applied in the campaign. For instance, at the start of the game, new players will get a campaign at random, and once they finish all of the missions in this campaign, they can select which campaign they would like to complete next.

Regarding the jump to the free-to-play model, game director Enric Álvarez stated that it was done so as to reach a wider audience. He said, “When we launched Raiders September last year, we hoped its low price point of $9.99 per campaign- would open it up to a large number of users, but it didn’t work as we planned. Our vision is to see our game enjoyed by millions of users for years to come and putting all of the game’s rich content into their hands for free is the way to realize it. We’ve answered our community and hope this removal of any payment barriers will build our devoted community further.”

Furthermore, Álvarez also explained why the game’s name has been changed to Spacelords- it’s basically because the game is about more than just the Raiders. He stated, “We felt that ‘Raiders’ only focused on one specific side of the battle for the Broken Planet: The Raiders. But this is about the Aleph, a mythical substance from the Broken Planet, a substance everybody wants – the Raiders, the Antagonists, each of the invading human factions…- All of them know that whoever controls the Aleph, will dominate the universe as the ultimate Spacelord. So, the new brand is not going to change the game lore at all, quite the contrary. Spacelords comes to embrace all of them -Raiders and Antagonists- under one umbrella.”

You can check out the announcement trailer for Spacelords below along with some screenshots below. Spacelords is currently available for free on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.