A trailer for Ananta, previously known as Project Mugen, has dropped. It depicts a game that could do for the GTA-a-like genre what Genshin Impact did for the action RPG.
Ananta is a free-to-play open-world game coming to PlayStation 5, PC, iOS and Android, and mashes up elements from a fistful of other games, wrapping them up in an anime style.
This latest trailer shows Spider-Man style city traversal, driving, a darts mini-game, story cut-scenes, weight training, basketball, third-person brawling, shooting, stealth, supernatural powers and boss battles — all within two minutes and 16 seconds. It also features a host of running toilets with robot legs, a reference to the Skibidi Toilet online phenomenon. It’s quite the overstuffed melange.
Just a few days ago, the game’s official YouTube account was dropping teaser trailers under its original name, Project Mugen.
“You will play as an investigator, searching for and researching Chaos,” says Zane Zhang, the game’s technical director.
“Our development team is devoted to combining the feeling of freedom with the metropolis vibe. To achieve this goal, we introduced technology that procedurally generates city environments, allowing us to quickly build an entire city.”
The “chaos” he references appears to be turning people into dangerous monsters. And the metropolis it has infected is Nova City, although the game will feature multiple cities the player can travel between.
“Players will meet a variety of interesting characters, jump into exciting combat, solve challenges and safeguard the balance by overcoming threats to humanity, all while enjoying unparalleled freedom to traverse and discover Nova City on a journey to find out who you really are,” reads the official blurb.
This is a gacha title, one free to download and play that makes its money through in-game purchases.
Ananta is being published by NetEase, which also publishes the extremely successful Naraka: Bladepoint. It currently attracts more than 200,000 concurrent players on Steam each day.
Ananta is in development at Naked Rain, a subsidiary studio of NetEase.
The game was originally announced in August as part of the Gamescom show but, as yet, no release date details are available.
Ananta’s official website offers a pre-registration form for those interested in receiving future details over email, and a counter suggests more than 6.2 million people have signed up for updates already.
