Popularium releases alpha for Chaos Agents from Magic creator Richard Garfield

Agents of chaosa new robot battle royale game from Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield, launches private alpha testing today.

The game is from the startup studio Popularium It has received a lot of attention since its announcement at Gen Con 2024. More than 20,000 players have signed up for 1,000 seats in the alpha test. To meet demand, Popularium will increase the number of alpha seats to 5,000 for the initial alpha launch, and plans to expand the alpha beyond 10,000 players in early 2025.

“We have been overwhelmed by the response to the Alpha announcement,” Arka Rai, president and CTO of Popularium, said in a statement. “The number of players wanting to join the Alpha and experience Richard’s vision is more than 20 times greater than we expected. We continue to receive hundreds of new applications every week. We expect over 30,000 applicants by the end of the year. The team is working through the holidays to accommodate as many players as possible In this early alpha phase we want every applicant to have the opportunity to try out Chaos Agents as soon as possible.

To prepare for this rapid expansion, Popularium launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on the Republic platform. The campaign was fully committed and then oversubscribed within six hours of its public launch.

The Popularium campaign on Republic allows members of the public to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the campaign’s quick closure to players and fans of Popularium founders Garfield and Jonathan Bankard (co-creator of Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Command and Conquer) wanting to directly support the development of their next original game.

“This is an exciting time for Chaos Agents,” Garfield said in a community Q&A session marking the launch of the Chaos Agents alpha and crowdfunding campaign on Republic. “The game has been well received by players, much more than I expected at this early stage. There are many different types of playstyles that we want to incorporate into Chaos Agents, and thanks to the community and technology we have built, it has become clear what we can and should do.” We Build It There’s no more exciting time to develop a game when players are clearly enjoying it, but at the same time the opportunities for improvements seem endless.

Multiplayer game forever

The Alpha launch follows the announcement of Popularium’s commitment to a “multiplayer forever” model for Chaos Agents. Through the use of dedicated servers and its own Chaos cloud gaming engine, Popularium plans to ensure that Chaos Agents will be a multiplayer game that “can’t be killed” or taken offline.

It is expected that players will always have a way to play the game with the globally unique superheroes they have recruited into their team. Garfield and Ray attributed the positive response to this announcement because it helped spark additional interest in the Chaos Agents Alpha campaign and crowdfunding.

In Chaos Agents, the first “autobattler-royale” game, players train and guide a world-class unique superhero – their own Chaos Agent – to victory in a grand battle royale against dozens of other agents.

The player trains and strengthens their hero through deep strategic card playing similar to legendary Garfield games, like Magic and Keyforge, then sits back and watches their agent go into battle, preparing for the next round of upgrades. Each agent is globally unique – meaning only one player in the world will be able to play with an agent at a time and become the global expert on that agent.

“Developing and creating new species is a lot of fun,” Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents, said in a statement. “All of us at Popularium have worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone that started out as small dreams that ended up impacting many more players than we initially hoped. We’re trying something similar with Chaos Agents – to bring the mecha fighting game genre to more people through a proven format For battle royale games, the advantage we have now is the early involvement of our community in helping us polish this uncut gem into a bright, shiny diamond through their play and now the investments that allow them to own a piece of the Popularium.

Chaos Agents plans to expand the alpha in late January alongside the Second World Championship of Chaos, and plans to expand the capacity of the alpha each month before entering early access in late 2025. Players can sign up for the alpha at Popularium.com and request priority access. By joining
Servants of Chaos Agents of Discord.

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