
Take a game like PlanetSide 2, turn player characters into ants, and shrink them down to insect sizes to fight it out among each other. That’s the extremely boiled-down summary for the in-development shooter Iron Swarm, an indie effort from a studio known as Faction 504 that seeks to put together a “persistent online tactical RPG” where players take on the role of biomechanical ant-soldiers in an endless war for territory, survival, and supremacy.
“From the ruins of an Earth reclaimed by nature – ANTS! Mutated and evolved for war; continued their conquests. Harvesting iron from a lost civilization to create weapons while clinging to the remnants of life below.”
A dev blog about the game explains that the project was inspired by a love of both PlanetSide 2 and Foxhole as well as encouraged by the success of the indie co-op soulslike FlyKnight. At the very base level, players join up with one of four factions and engage in territory battles in a persistent war. Map size and player sizes weren’t discussed in the blog, but it does use “MMO” as an identifier.
Iron Swarm also wants to inject some more RPG elements into the persistent shooter sub-genre, such as managing of supply chains and front lines, ripper-style body modifications, and the possibility of player-run factions. There are also plans to let players lead NPC units into battle in order to ensure that the game doesn’t always require a critical mass of players online to function; the lead dev explains that this came from being burned by solo development of an MMO twice over.
Things right now appear to be in a mostly greybox state as the game’s bespoke ANTECH I engine continues development and refinement, and the most recent news is so far couched in Discord for the time being until a website is built. This is all to say that Iron Swarm may be a long way off, but if you’re looking to get off of PlanetSide 2’s arguably bumpy ride, this project might be worth your notice.