No joke: Robocraft Royale is in development, sign up for alpha

Sit down, everybody, here's a quick history lesson. First it was the MOBA craze, with every game trying to get a piece of the League of Legends cake. A few years later, everyone was trying to jump onto the trading card game thanks to Hearthstone's success. Now, it's the Battle Royale mode that is driving everyone nuts, with praise going to Playerunknown's Battlegrounds for making it massive.

Fortnite Battle Royale liked that, a lot. Also Paladins: Battlegrounds.

Of all the games that we'd bet on quickly tacking a Battle Royale game mode on, I wouldn't have considered Robocraft. Maybe Cross Fire, since it's still one of the most profitable free-to-play games in the world. Perhaps Unreal Tournament, or Quake Champions. World of Tanks is almost a straight bet, and Crossout could also do it. For some reason, Robocraft is doing it before all of those.

Freejam has just announced Robocraft Royale, an “experiment” where you fight against 100 other players in a 64 square kilometer map filled with cities, industrial sites, and crashed spaceships. The devs call this an experiment because for now it's something that they “slapped together in a matter of months using assets from two different games made by Freejam.” It's a proof of concept, and development will continue if the player feedback is positive.

Unlike the original Robocraft, you won't be able to create your robot, having to pick from a bunch of selected machines from Robocraft’s Community Robot Factory (CRF). But if you design something awesome on Robocraft, it may be chosen to appear in Robocraft Royale. Right now, Freejam isn't sure if Robocraft Royale is going to be a free game, since the focus is on getting the gameplay right for now.

You can sign up for the alpha at the official website. Get ready for a deluge of announcements in 2018 of more Battle Royale modes and games.