Indie Russian developer Bitbox announces Life is Feudal, a "hardcore" sandbox MMORPG they plan to bring to Windows PCs in 2015. They say they've been working on this for three years now, which explains why the game's official website has a half-dozen scattered entries dating back to 2011 and offers this trailer showing rudimentary alpha footage from the end of last year.

Moscow, Russia, October 22nd 2013: Independent games developer ‘Bitbox’ is proud to announce the development of their incredibly ambitious and highly addictive launch-title - ‘Life Is Feudal’ - a vast and immersive sandbox MMORPG set in a realistic medieval fictional world! Scheduled for worldwide release on PC in 2015, this incredibly large MMORPG is nearing its initial playable stages after 3 years of hard work by the developer. ‘Life Is Feudal’ improves on the genre by bringing gameplay back to its basics, while improving the experience by adding unique new features and contents to its massive 450 square kilometer persistent seamless world!

Ever wanted to go back in time and thrive and survive in medieval times? How would you survive? How would you fend for yourself? Where would you live, and how would you defend against players and predators from the wild? Could you build a peaceful community to live in, and would you even if you could?

Because ‘Life Is Feudal’ is an open persistent virtual world, players can roam around freely without restrictions. Its terraforming abilities allow you to shape the terrain organized in a unique grid-pattern. This means that players can not only raise, lower and flatten terrain, but also dig tunnels and underground caverns. Buildings can be predefined or modular, and can freely be constructed and placed anywhere within reasonable limitations. Predefined buildings are ready for placement and available through a menu, while modular buildings offer greater control as elements such as walls must be placed prior to construction.

An important feature in ‘Life Is Feudal’ is its highly advanced and impressive skillcap-system, in which players can use any combination of skills adapting to their preferred choice of gameplay! In the game, stats and player talent plays an important factor as each skill is divided by primary and secondary stats. On the crafting side of the skill table, there is a whole set of building and farming skills forming the basis of game economy along with metalworking, tree cutting and alchemy skills. Featuring 25 primary crafting skills, 25 primary combat skills, 5 secondary crafting skills and 5 secondary combat skills, the depth, complexity and level of detail is endless!

No great MMORPG is without enemies! Siege and battle events decide which faction gains or remains control of territory and resource veins, and players looking to invade or conquer a kingdom must issue a challenge to opposing players. Combat can be experienced in either 1st or 3rd person view, and uses a no target combat system. There is no lock-on, and players must carry out individual actions such as swing, stab and block, for example. Physics come into play as well, as does the quickness of the attacker and defender. A swift use of a sword at a high velocity causes extensive damage, and when players die, loss of skill occurs by an alignment factor at random.

As something truly unique, ‘Life Is Feudal’ includes a series of mini-games that adds immersion and fun to the medieval crafting process, and allows gamers to play isolated parts of the game directly from a browser!

Combining the very best of Free-To-Play and Buy-To-Play adventuring, ‘Life Is Feudal’ offers to players a “newbie” continent almost without restrictions giving a sense of the games full scope, complexity, and gameplay prior to buying a license for the full version.