14 DAY TRIAL // Hazardous Software has announced that Achron, a title billed as “the world’s first meta-time strategy game,” is available for preorder starting with January 1, 2010 for all those who are interested in the idea and are ready to contribute to the further development of the concept. Achron is being distributed through a proprietary digital distribution platform that Hazardous has created.
Achron is an interesting concept because it actually allows the player to time travel as the match progresses, allowing for battles to take place at different moments and for consequences to propagate in the timeline. Those who preorder to game will immediately get access to five single player levels set to introduce the major gameplay concepts for Achron, including command hierarchy and time travel.
All those who get the game now will also receive regular builds from the development team and gain full access to the development tools, which can be used to create mods based on the final version of Achron. The first release past the initial five levels is expected in March, when multiplayer functionality is set to be offered.
Christopher Hazard, who is the president and founder of Hazardous Software, said that “Based on an extraordinary number of fan requests to begin experimenting with the time travel mechanism, we wanted fans to have the opportunity to participate in the creation of Achron by putting the novel technology directly into the hands of users.”
Achron is certainly an interesting idea and it is befitting to see they are taking on an exotic development model to match the exotic gameplay that the real time strategy title is proposing. The problem is that offering the game for preorder to actually fund the rest of development might be detrimental if not enough players are interested.