Aertan

Aertan is a cooperative online RPG set on a tropical island and the seas around it. Players share one persistent server world: a fishing village with inhabitants who follow their own daily routines, a safe harbor, wild shores, and open water with several sea zones to sail through. The core loop revolves around the sea. Players fish with rods and bait, row and sail small boats, and hunt large sea creatures with a harpoon and line, where tension, stamina and the boat itself are part of the fight. Catches and carcasses are butchered, cooked or crafted into tools, gear and bait. Gathering and crafting feed a skill system inspired by EVE Online: skills train over time through a queue, while combat and gathering only accelerate it. Progression is horizontal rather than level-based. Characters are built from modular parts with a choice of species, face and body, and are meant to be equipped through crafting and trade. The design draws on Albion Online, EVE Online, ArcheAge and Dredge. The game is in early alpha and is available for Windows through its own launcher.

For thousands of years the world has lived without magic. The gods who once sealed Aer — the living tide of the world — into the veins of the earth and the trenches of the sea are long gone. Only a lighthouse on a cliff that never goes dark still hints that the Seals exist. Now the Seals are cracking. Through the Rifts, Aer pours back into the world: strange catches, lights on the water, the dead who will not stay down, fog that walks against the wind. Aer needs anchors — wills untouched by this world — so it reaches into ours. Every player is one of the Summoned: someone who died for a single second in their own world and woke in the surf of Aertan with a spiral Mark burned into their forearm. The Mark grants no power, only return: death on Aertan is not the end, but it must be bargained for at the old spiral stones. An old fisherman named Garren waits on the shore. The Order of the Lighthouse wants to tame the tide; the Drowned want to let it swallow the world. Between them stands the island — and the Summoned.