Nearly a year after a successful Kickstarter, NeXeon Technologies’ reboot of Face of Mankind, subtitled Fall of The Dominion, is releasing its open beta tomorrow, April 18.
We know some of you will not remember this, so as a brief aside, the original Face of Mankind was released December 2009, after development that dates back to closed beta in 2004. Original developer Duplex Systems encountered many difficulties and setbacks releasing the game throughout the years. These included DDoS attacks and former publisher Ojom bowing out in 2007. NeXeon took on publishing duties for the 2009 release, and a year later, development duties were transferred to NeXeon completely.
As an aside, I have to point out that NeXeon remains an e-commerce company, with cloud hosting and other services. It has taken on Face of Mankind, and launched its Kickstarter in parallel to its main business. It was a truly unique situation, and perhaps highlights how NeXeon themselves got caught up with this game.
And they may have been compelled to get involved in pursuit of the game’s vision. Face of Mankind is a sci-fi themed MMO with a lot of emphasis on agency, as any player’s individual actions can produce radical change in the game world.
NeXeon promises the open beta already features customizable factions, capturable world areas, capturable prisons, new production, mining, bounty hunting, and enhanced mission systems, apartment theft, and an expanding vortex network, based on how many clones the universe has. You can download the client and get involved in tomorrow’s open beta here.
