Sega, Puzzle Pirates Dev Announce Free-To-Play Online Game

Sega of America and Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates, Doctor Who: Worlds in Time) announced Spiral Knights, a new free-to-play multiplayer online action-adventure game launching this spring. Promising "classic, console-style adventuring in a persistent online world", Spiral Knights will allow up to four friends to explore the "ever-changing" Clockworlds setting, fight monsters, solve puzzles, and find treasures. Players will be able to form guilds, craft hundreds of weapons and gear, customize their characters, and more. Spiral Knights will be subscription-free, but users can purchase virtual currency, Crystal Energy, which they can then spend on in-game equipment. Headquartered in San Francisco (with offices in Philadelphia and Madison), Three Rings is best known for developing popular MMORPG Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, a pioneer in the free-to-play field when it launched in 2003. The independent studio went on to release online strategy game Bang! Howdy and online game portal Whirled, and most recently struck a deal with BBC Worldwide to create an online multiplayer game based on the Doctor Who franchise. "Based on our experience with titles like Puzzle Pirates, as well as fond memories of dreaming up new games when we were kids, we have built an instantly accessible, action-packed world that appeals to gamers of every type," says Three Rings CEO Daniel James. He adds, "Spiral Knights skips the stereotypical level grind for a co-op adventure that is focused on fun gameplay above all else." The studio has worked on the title for several years now -- a beta test for Spiral Knights first appeared online in November 2009.