Pokemon inspired MMO announced by State of Decay developer Undead Labs

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting a long time for a good Pokemon MMO to show up and although I may have to keep waiting a while longer, there’s already news about something very similar. Undead Labs, the team behind State of Decay, announced their new project at Pax Prime and it seems to be what many of us have been looking for all this time. Moonrise is an upcoming free-to-play MMO inspired by Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering in which you play as a Warden and have to capture and do battle with various creatures. Sadly the game is only in development for mobile platforms at the moment and there is no news on whether or not we might end up seeing it on PC or consoles.

“One of the things that led to [Moonrise] existing — our founder has a thing that we go through when we’re pitching new game ideas,” Game Designer Richard Foge told Polygon. “He calls it the obviousness test: ‘Is this a thing that people want?’ And everybody wants a Pokémon MMO. It certainly was a source of the inspiration, but this is not a Pokémon clone.” However, battles in Moonrise are very similar to what you’re likely to see in Pokemon, with many creatures having elemental-based attacks that are stronger against certain elements and weaker against others. “We went with convention for a lot of them,” Foge said. “For something like stone, we went for natural analogues. Water erodes stone, or plants will grow up through a rock and split rock. Sometimes you don’t have a good natural analogue, so you have to make decisions based on the balance.”

Moonrise might not be the Pokemon MMO we’ve all been waiting for, but it certainly sounds like a great alternative and we’ll be keeping our eyes and ears open for more details. The game will release next year for Android, iOS and Kindle Fire.