Raze: Dungeon Arena is a promising upcoming hack ‘n slash RPG for mobile from developer WonderGame. It’s been in production for quite some time and we first posted about the game in late June. A couple of weeks later the developers took to our forums to seek out some beta testers for the game, and while that beta period is now over it did seem to produce a lot of great feedback from early players. Now WonderGame is taking the next step in the development process and has soft-launched the game in Australia to test out how their servers and everything holds up in a more realistic live environment as opposed to a small closed beta testing group. The strange thing? They’ve launched the game under the slightly different name Raziel: Dungeon Arena.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen developers try to be stealthy when soft-launching a game, sometimes changing the name of the game for the soft launch version or even publishing it under a dummy account in the App Store. The unusual thing here is that, while most developers who do that are trying NOT to be noticed by anyone, the Raze developers have posted about the Raziel soft launch in the Raze forum thread. So it doesn’t seem like they want to keep this a secret or anything and are probably actually hoping for some players so they can test out what they want to test out.
Which begs the question why the different name? Stranger still is that WonderGame mentions they might keep both versions around even after the global launch and possibly even release exclusive characters for each version. That’s not set in stone and personally I hope they don’t do that as I’m not going to play through and maintain progress in two different versions of the same game. It’s an interesting tactic though, and the bottom line is that if you enjoy hack ‘n slash RPGs and had Raze on your radar already, you can download the currently identical Raziel using the Australian App Store link below, and if you do then be sure to drop by the new forum thread for this soft-launch version and share your thoughts about the game. The global launch for Raze: Dungeon Arena (and possibly Raziel too?) is planned for the first week of September.
Australian App Store Link: Raziel Dungeon Arena, Free (Universal)
