As a former PlanetSide 2 player and general MMO fan, I couldn't help but be intrigued by the announcement of Reaper Actual two months ago. Developer Distinct Possibility Studios has put a lot of the old gang back together, from former Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley to Creative Director Matthew Higby and Senior Art Director Tramell Isaac.
Just like PlanetSide 2, Reaper Actual is an open-world MMOFPS set in a huge (four times as large as Warzone's Al Mazrah), seamless, and persistent map with potentially up to a thousand concurrent players. It will eventually feature combined arms warfare with ground, sea, and air vehicles. However, there are some key differences. PlanetSide 2 was based on the Realm vs Realm concept, asking players to side with one of three factions and conquer as much territory as possible. This new game shies away from that, putting players in the shoes of a mercenary who will work for any of several NPC factions in the game. That's another big difference: there were no NPCs whatsoever in PlanetSide 2, while they are a key component of Reaper Actual to make the world feel alive at all times. Additionally, the year being what it is, it also includes some extraction shooter elements.
I had the opportunity to check out a presentation of the game during Gamescom 2025. It was a Pre-Alpha and, therefore, unsurprisingly buggy—sometimes, the NPCs would lock up or get stuck. However, speaking to John Smedley and Matthew Higby, the potential to create a unique experience is definitely there. You can read our full chat about practically every facet of Reaper Actual below.
By the way, a paid Foundation Alpha will be available via Epic Games Store and the game's official website later this month, though the developers warn that only a limited number of copies will be sold at this stage to keep the playtesting pool relatively tight. Early next year, Reaper Actual will be released in early access on both Epic Games Store and Steam.
John Smedley: When you log into the world for the first time, you're put into your first base. This is a bunker base. There are warehouse bases, and we're adding apartment bases. We're adding many different types, and they come in different shapes and sizes. For example, the bunker base is a simple one with no garage, so you can't have your vehicles here. But it's also very secure, because there's only one entrance and one exit, which makes it easy to defend. There's hard points in here where you can mount turrets and set up traps across. In Reaper Actual, your base comes with a vault of a specific size based on the base size. And it also comes with Reapers, who are basically tier one operators from the world's different intelligence agencies and military services, and they each come with different loadouts. That loadout is something that they default to, so even if you die, you still come back with a loadout that is different per Reaper. Then you have abilities; we're changing them to tools. Callsign Zero has an ammunition crate and an armor crate, for example, though I think he's gonna end up with just one of those fairly soon.
Back at your base, you can also buy and sell things with a different faction. There are different factions that, if you do missions for them, you'll gain faction reputation with them, opening up the purchase of cooler and cooler stuff. This is the north island of Morova. Morova itself is 16 km by 12 km and made up of these two Islands: the southern one and the northern one. For now, we're focused on the northern island, which is already huge—it's about 3 km by 2.
The biggest differentiator between our game and any shooter you've ever played (other than PlanetSide 2 if you played that one) is that it is set in a persistent world. Unlike other extraction shooters, we are not round-based, and we also have a full day/night cycle, complete with dynamic weather.
So, this is a fully open world PvPvE game. The NPCs themselves are in these five different factions and fight each other all the time, so you may be running around the world and come upon a battle between them. When there's an event, it's typically two AI factions fighting, and there's missions available for players.
Is Reaper Actual currently in Alpha stage or Pre-Alpha?
John Smedley: It's in Pre-Alpha right now. We'll be launching an Alpha soon, it's called Foundation Alpha, on September 22, where we are going to sell a very small amount of copies of the game to let up a small number of people in and actually play the game because we want players to come in and actually tell us if the game is fun, and teach us the things we don't know about our own game.
Are you using Unreal Engine 5?
John Smedley: We are using Unreal Engine 5.5 as of today. We'll be on Unreal 5.6 by the time we launch our Foundation Alpha and, by the time we launch the game in early access next year, probably up to about 5.8. We've done a really good job of optimizing the game. I'm regularly getting 120 frames per second. I'm pretty happy with what we're doing on that.
This is an example of an actual player base. You can have helipads, you can have garages, you can have fancy ones. The difference is, look at all the glass around here. More entrances mean more places to defend against people coming in. People can raid your base if you collect 'heat' in the game, very similar to GTA. As you go through the world and shoot people, you collect that heat, and if it gets too high without cooling off and not shooting players and NPCs for a while, the players can follow you back to your base and you end up in a battle with them. But the defender has the advantage because they can set up defenses. Also, the Reapers they've collected but not actually deployed can actually be set up to defend your base for you.
That's pretty cool. Are bases instanced?
John Smedley: They are, but they have a real world location.
Do the Reapers have different skills?
John Smedley: They have different abilities in the form of tools that they have available to them, the ammunition crate being an example.
Matthew Higby: The idea that we're going with right now is that they're all sort of itemized since it's an extraction game, so you get some by default in your toolkit, but you can replace them if you want to, so you can really sort of form exactly the type of Reaper that you want, but the Reapers themselves by default have a base toolkit.
You can think of it as itemizing in a MOBA. By default, this character does this. But if you throw these items on it, now I can do these additional things, and then you can unlock, you know, a more medic-oriented one or a more explosives-oriented one. You always have the free loadout, but again, if you want to have some variation or you want to do something special in your run, you can grab a different tool and overload those defaults.
I'm guessing you also have vehicles right in the game, correct?
John Smedley: Yep, we will eventually have ground, air, and sea vehicles. We currently have ground vehicles and helicopters in, but they're not functional. This is an island, so we're going to have sea vehicles as well.
What are you targeting for when it comes to time-to-kill?
John Smedley: More like Call of Duty DMZ or Escape from Tarkov.
Matthew Higby: One thing to keep in mind is that the purpose of these PvE events like this is to attract players to this event so that players are running around. There's no players on the server with us now, so it's a little bit less exciting than it could be, but in general, this sort of event is going on and a firefight is happening. It's a little uncertain if there's players down there, or if it's just NPCs. So, you really have to stay on your toes and pay attention to what's happening around you when they're playing.
When we playtest, you definitely have that feel right now. The other thing is that the combat is meant to be sort of pocketed in and sporadic, so it moves players around. It's not supposed to be the whole airport that's filled. You'll notice it's mostly depopulated, and that's intentional so that we have tension and breathing space between all of these different pockets of activity. Maybe there could be 20 or 30 players that also get pulled over to the same area, so it's not intended to be just loaded with NPCs that you're going through like in The Division or something like that.
Did you test how many players Reaper Actual can actually hold?
John Smedley: Right now, we're going to get up to 200 players, but we're going to get over a thousand hopefully by the time we're just a little bit after launch. It's going to be a large game..
Matthew Higby: The interesting thing about this is just the sense that there's a firefight happening nearby me, and you kind of have that sense going on while playing this game as opposed to something like Tarkov, where there's a little just sporadically once in a while. It's mostly very quiet. Here, pretty much always, as you're running around, you're going to hear gunfights in the distance to attract other players to it constantly.
John Smedley: And that is our intent, to bring those together. Now I'm taking you to a city called Alaria. You could drive there, fly there, take a boat there, take the metro train, or walk there if you want to. This world is huge. The scope that we're going for is absolutely stunningly massive. Some of the buildings you can scale up and some you can go into, but our goal is to make it so that this world feels big and has all kinds of different places and nooks and crannies to explore. And of course, good sniping positions. Are you familiar with the map Al Mazrah from Call of Duty: Warzone? This is about four times the size of the largest Warzone map. We also have MMO features like time of day. The moon actually waxes and wanes and goes in full sometimes and a dark night sometimes. Our goal is to make the world feel very alive to people. The AI factions are there to bring players together to fight. Normally, it's kind of boring demoing a PvP game when I'm not on the server with hundreds of other people, but this is very fun in our team playtests. It plays very differently when you have PvP, obviously.
Matthew Higby: Then there is our mission system, which is designed for you to keep a persistently running world constantly populated with interesting activities. All of these places where John is running around can be areas where mission objectives spawn, like a laptop could be there with a key that you need to have a laptop to be able to get it, and that building is populated with NPCs, because that event has spawned. Again, it uses the mission system to draw players to that location. You could have one faction sending players to defend the laptop so it doesn't get hacked, and other players are being sent to attack the laptop so it does get hacked.
You can even have a laptop spawn on the top floor and a locker spawn on the bottom floor and there's different missions targeting both of those locations just to draw players to the same building. And we can kind of laser target that across the map, in a variety of different ways, making two events. So there's a hundred players at two different events or a hundred events where two players are being sent to each of a hundred different events, and various combinations in between.
All to keep players moving around and earning rewards without just hanging out in the same spot all the time. The missions are constantly changing based on the opportunities available in the game world. John was mentioning the daylight cycle. So many of these game features are really unique to our game, because not a lot of other games have a persistent world. We have to do a lot of stuff to support and make a persistent world work instead of just being a session-based experience where it's always the same thirty minutes, start to finish, every time.
Does NPC activity change based on the time of day?
Matthew Higby: Yeah, and the Obsidian Syndicate faction, they're like John Wick-inspired assassins. They are more willing to use silenced weapons, night vision goggles, etc. When you're fighting them at nighttime, you know they have more of a threat to them, while other NPCs might just be really, really easy, and they go kind of bunker back to behind their sandbags at nighttime, instead of doing patrols. They have completely different behavioral routines based on time of day and weather. When it's pouring rain, the NPCs' awareness gets pulled in so that they can't really hear as much. Similarly, you can't hear somebody chasing you.
Eventually, if we add electrical storms, they'll interfere with electronics and all of that. It's all basically in service of trying to create a dynamic environment and within this persistent world, so nothing feels very static, and everything feels emergent.
John Smedley: We have villages in between. This island is getting more populous every single day.
Matthew Higby: And player bases, too, scattered all over the map. The APB system is also designed around this persistent world, because we don't have a thing that forces you out in the game world. But over the course of a session, depending on what activities you engage in, your heat builds up and that creates more resistance in the world against you. But it also unlocks different kinds of PvP missions, so you could assassinate a captain from one of the other factions and that faction could put a bounty mission on you. So other players could take that mission from the Obsidian Syndicate to come assassinate you, or if it gets far enough, they could even take one to go raid your base and destroy things in your base. You have to pay attention to it because you're generating heat. This rewards stealthy gameplay, being more strategic, not just running, gunning, and killing every single thing.
Do you envision players being able to push their faction to be stronger than the others?
Matthew Higby: Yeah, I mean, you don't really align directly with a faction, but you could decide, for this season or for the entire career, I'm only going to do missions for these guys, and certainly if you're helping them complete more of their objectives... The way I'm thinking about it right now is that basically each season, here's what this faction is up to this season, and here's what they want. They operate in a needs-based way and seasonally, what we could do is the most successful one last season could be getting additional rewards for the next season. So if you really engage and earn a lot of loyalty and reputation with that action, you would get some additional rewards for having helped the winning faction the most out of all the factions. But it would be up to you if you want to engage in that. We want you to be a mercenary, gun for hire, taking whatever mission for whomever at any given time.
Given your background, are you going to add some clan-based systems to Reaper Actual?
Matthew Higby: When I think about describing the game, there's three major efforts that we're making. We have this whole moment-to-moment gameplay, getting all the FPS gameplay and vehicles up to a level of quality that feels comparable with these other humongous, triple-A games. There's the whole management of the persistent world, including how NPCs spawn, how loot spawns, et cetera. Then we have the outer Morova layer, which consists of outfits (clans), player-to-player trade, crafting, economy, progression, and bases. And that's very MMO-inspired, with a crafting system that should feel more like something from an EVE game, when it comes to the depth and complexity of something. Even the outfit system will be a lot more in-depth than a regular clan system in a shooter. That's the MMO, long-engagement system layer of the game.
So, these three major design and development efforts are ongoing. The third one is the least apparent when we are doing a demo like this. Vehicles are halfway between moment-to-moment and the persistent world. I guess vehicles go through all of it because you have vehicles in your base, too. You can customize your base to be really awesome at repairing and modifying vehicles, but you would basically be choosing to specialize your base that way instead of specializing it as a medical facility, as a weapon crafting station, or a highly defensible vault. You could have up to five bases, so you can customize several of them in different ways, depending on exactly what you want to try to produce or optimize for as a player. For instance, you could get a warehouse base and put a Medivac on it, and that Medivac can kind of extract you and heal you.
Will there be any clan bases at some point in Reaper Actual?
Matthew Higby: Yes, outfit bases are definitely in the plan. We already have some very large mansion-style bases, even penthouse apartment-style bases, that would fit really well for clans. The plan is to have a permission system to decide which people can access the stations. And I guess also VoIP, which is expected nowadays.
John Smedley: What's funny is that we also have Discord integration. Players can link their Discords, and if you run a Discord server, you can make that a channel where you can communicate directly. So, text chat is from Discord, and so is our VoIP. We're one of the earliest companies integrating that. By the way, we don't have the train system yet, but this will be one of the ways you can extract back to your base.
Matthew Higby: The idea eventually is that this would be a real train that's moving around. We have all of these different solutions that we need to apply to the persistent world, to make it make sense, and having this kind of universal deploy and extract, it's a mechanism that everybody can have access to. If I want to extract with the helicopter, I actually have to customize my base and invest in a helicopter, but being able to deploy pretty much anywhere on the island using the metro station is something that people get by default.
John Smedley: Some bases have garages, so the warehouse space comes with the garage. If you find a vehicle, you can stash it because vehicles are rare, and they're meant to be rare in our game. Eventually, you'll start seeing more and more, because in theory, everybody could get a vehicle in a base and a warehouse base. In practice, that won't actually happen.
Is Reaper Actual going to go into early access eventually?
John Smedley: Yes, early next year, we will launch the game into early access.
Do you have an idea of how long it will stay in early access before 1.0?
John Smedley: I don't. We're a small company. We raised 32 and a half million. You see the quality we're able to deliver, we're trying to compete with Call of Duty and these bigger games. We have 125 people on the team. Over time, we are adding more and more features, but what we want is to make our early access release fully featured, and then we're just going to keep adding to it like any good MMO would and make it much bigger over time. I think this game is gonna appeal the most to people who like extraction shooters, second to the MMO crowd, and I think there's a good overlap based on the data I've seen. A lot of people have played MMOs now, so we'll see how the target demographic ends up being.
The early access version of Reaper Actual will be on both Epic Games Store and Steam, right?
John Smedley: Yes, although our Foundation Alpha will only be on Epic. As you are probably aware, we have an entirely optional Web3 component. Our Foundation Alpha version will be on Epic and also on our own website. I want to make sure that I'm clear about this: there will be no way to cross stuff over from Steam to Web3 or vice versa, so there's no sneaky stuff going on. When we say it's optional, we mean it. We understand a lot of people don't like Web3 stuff. We get it.
Yeah, that was going to be one of my questions. When some gamers just hear about Web3, they wiggle their noses since they dislike the concept. What's your explanation for adopting it?
John Smedley: We've made it entirely optional. On Steam, though, we will have the Steam Community Market, which you may be familiar with, where you sell Counter-Strike stuff. We will activate that, and we treat Web3 very similarly to the Steam Community Market, where if players want to participate, they can; if they don't, just play Steam or Epic and not touch any of it. So the fact that it's optional gives us a game that anybody can feel good about playing. If you're into the Web3 aspects, it lets you sell things directly to other players.
But there's a key reason we're doing that. We're also using it to power the UGC (user-generated content) marketplace. We're going to let players make gun skins, Reaper skins, and let them do cool stuff like rent a server from us, and that's on Web2 as well. They can rent a server at launch, and after launch, we're going to have moddable servers so that if people wanted to make a Battle Royale game on our island, great, they could do it.
Matthew Higby: I think the key thing, too, when we say that it's optional, it's that you can use the exact same functionality. It's not that this feature only exists over here. It's just if you want it to be Web3 activated, and you want to put things on blockchain, it's in that version. If you want to just trade things back and forth between the players, you can totally do that, too, in the Steam Community Market.
I guess Web3 players will get to sell their stuff, right?
John Smedley: Correct, but so Steam players can sell them on the Community Market if they want to.
Aside from that, is there going to be an in-game market in Reaper Actual?
And is that a central auction house?
John Smedley: Yeah. But the two versions don't cross. You cannot trade items between a Steam account and a Web3 account; that's completely blocked. They do play together, but there's no trading of items between the two versions. There's an in-game marketplace, but on Steam, you can also sell stuff on the Steam Community Market, which, let's not call it real money because it really isn't, but we're all aware of the fact that you can sell Counter-Strike 2 stuff, for instance, on gray market sites. There's nothing we can do about that, but we're focused on letting functionality work for people who want to sell stuff. If people want to sell their in-game stuff and then reuse that credit to buy other Steam games, they can. We all do that, at least most people I know do that. In the Epic version, there'll be none of that whatsoever. I think the way we're doing it, where we're not selling power in any way, kind of takes away the negative argument, but I realize some players are not convinced. They're making Web3 into a worse monster than it actually is to some people. They've seen so many bad Web3 games and scams that they think every game's like that. We're not doing anything like that. We're doing it very ethically.
Matthew Higby: We've been obsessing about how we can have any of our NFT or crypto assets actually be utility-based as opposed to just being speculative value. That's one of the problems with many of these NFT games: people don't play for any reason except for the trade and making money off their NFT. We're like, how can we actually use this technology, which is actually interesting, to bring new utility value to players in the game?
An example of this is that warehouse base that you customize to be like a Medivac station. It could have taken hundreds of hours of progression to be able to level up the various crafting stations and other hard points in the base. If you want to, you can just package up that whole base as one piece, along with all the progression, all the components that you've got in it and sell it as an asset, using an NFT, and that's something kind of cool and neat that some progress that you've made, some customization that you've made, is unique to you and you can decide to transfer that whole thing between players. That's very different than just, I bought this because it's gonna be worth more money tomorrow. It's interesting because it contains a lot of value in terms of utility in what you do with the game.
I guess people have been selling and buying MMO accounts for a long time.
John Smedley: I wish more people understood that. You're right, it's been there for as long as MMOs have existed. We've been there as long as MMOs have existed, with EverQuest. If people just look around them, you can sell Counter-Strike 2 knives, right now, for crypto, on a gray market site. It's been there for five years. We feel like we're doing it the right way. We're making them optional, but at some point, people have to make up their own minds. I respect people's opinions on this. I just happen to think that if they thought a little bit about it... Most people don't know that you can sell a Counter-Strike 2 knife; they're unaware of that fact. This stuff's been out there for a long time.
Do you eventually plan to launch Reaper Actual on consoles?
John Smedley: We do, but it's gonna take, you know, a year, maybe a year and a half before we're ready to get there and we have to have a good player rights. We're a small company, and the funding that we've raised is more than enough to launch the PC version, but not enough to build the console version just yet. So we're going to use the revenue, we're going to reinvest in the game, we're going to keep reinvesting to make this thing better for players.
Would it be a big unified community with cross-play?
John Smedley: Everything is crossplay these days. It's way more fun. One nice thing about our game is that, unlike traditional round-based games - are you aware of the term matchmaking liquidity? What it means is, you ever play a dead game, and it's hard to get a match? That's matchmaking liquidity. What's great about our game is that these are persistent servers and we keep them full. So, when you log in, there's still persistence everywhere, and all the things that you have are persistent. We don't worry about trying to matchmake people into these 40-minute matches, so if somebody kills you in the overworld and you go back to your base, you can go hunt that person down.
We've even got this insurance feature, these trackers. They're kind of like AirTags, and if you have a tag attached to some super gun that you've worked on for a while with a bunch of attachments on it, you can actually track down the person's base and get it back. We've got interesting features that tie into the persistence you just don't get elsewhere. If somebody kills you in Escape from Tarkov, you can't get them back unless you're lucky enough to be in another lobby with them. Here, just walk back outside, go back to where they were, and take your revenge.
Since you mentioned that consoles are in the plan...
John Smedley: Down the line, I want it to be clear.
Gotcha. But will there be gamepad support for the PC version at the early access launch?
John Smedley: Absolutely. 40% of players play with game pads on PC. The support is technically in there, but it's not finished.
Matthew Higby: We need to do a bunch of user interface updates to make it more gamepad-friendly.
Is Reaper Actual adopting a free-to-play business model?
John Smedley: It will be buy-to-play at first, but then we will go free-to-play when we do our 1.0 launch.
Do you know the price yet?
John Smedley: Well, for early access, we're going to have three levels of being able to get in: $30, $50, and $75. Why aren't we going free to play at lunch? I mentioned we're a small company. In order to build a better and better game, we need people and resources. This gives us the opportunity to get people to buy. We will notify people well in advance of when it's going free-to-play, so nobody feels like they got screwed, and they're also getting exclusive items. That's an important part of the way we're approaching our Foundation Alpha release on September 22. It's a really early version of the game. What we're trying to do there. We're only going to sell a limited number of copies because what we want is a playtest community that's a decent size that can play all The Time with us directly. They'll have unique access to us. We'll be on Discord with them.
Do you think there might be some open public testing between this Foundation Alpha and the early access release?
John Smedley: There will be periods where we'll open it up to everybody. We're going to be doing that slowly as we see how the game quality is and whether it's fun. Do we have bugs? Did we think something would work and it didn't? Before we go to the masses, that's why it's going to be very exclusive.
Matthew Higby: While working on PlanetSide 2, we found out quickly that with these games, you can play test them all you want with the development team, and that helps a lot for things like, does the guns feel good, does the time to kill feel good. You can dial in a lot of that stuff, but how does the game feel when people are playing it for real over the course of several hours? In PlanetSide 2, we had no idea how to make bases work properly until Beta, when we actually had hundreds of people trying to jump over the walls of bases. They were doing things we would have never predicted. That is why we must get in touch with them early so we can start adjusting before we get completely invested in any of the solutions we've thought of.
Thank you for your time.
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