Space MMORTS Starborne is now in open beta

Not much to do for the next ten weeks? You might fancy a go on Starborne, a multiplayer real-time strategy game with thousands of players in each weeks-long match. After five years of alpha testing, today it launched into open beta and wants you to come have a poke. Our Sin had a go on a Starborne alpha last year and called it "a calmer kind of multiplayer space skulduggery." Yes, a gentler form of gathering resources, building bases, forming alliances, and zapping the heck out of thousands of spacerivals.

Changes coming with the move from alpha to beta include a new map, three different victory conditions, improved performance and stability, rounds sped up to 10 weeks, an in-game tutorial, and space novelties to find including "alien artefacts, vortexes, and broken planets." Love a broken planet, me.

"I'm so proud of the new map design," Solid Clouds CEO Stefán Gunnarsson said in today's announcement. "It really manages to condense all the lessons we've learned over the past 5 years. With it, we are both catering to more play styles and also able to supercharge the deeply player-driven political side of the game."

If you fancy a go, you can register for the open beta on Starborne's site.

"Starborne is weirdly low-pressure," Sin said, considering it has hints of Eve Online and Neptune's Pride. She explained, "The time frames involved in moving fleets make it fire and forget, rather than the time-devouring 'fire, notice your opponent reacting, cancel, adjust target, fire again, repeat' pattern I'd feared. It doesn't consume your waking thoughts, as checking in for five minutes five or six times a day is plenty, and I've gone whole days without touching it."