Gardens Has Raised Millions for Their “Indie/AAA” ARPG

It’s understandable if you’re wondering who the heck Gardens are. The studio is still raising funding for their freshman title, and the actual game has yet to be announced. Said fundraising is going well, however — Gardens announced today that the studio has raised just over 31 million dollars from various mucky mucks. These big bucks will go towards crafting a game described as an “online PvPvE Fantasy Adventure Sandbox ARPG” that “blends indie innovation and AAA ambition”.

Lofty goals, but they’ve certainly got the money for it; while 31mil isn’t quite the budget games series like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto garner, it sure is a lot more than the average indie studio can manage. It seems like they might have the requisite talent, too: the Garden’s team includes industry vets who’ve worked on plenty of games you’ve heard of, from Outer Wilds and Journey to What Remains of Edith Finch and Tunic.

The game they want to build sounds wonderfully ambitious, with “novel cooperative gameplay that rewards
players who help each other, which can encourage friendship and dialogue with PvP and conflict in interesting and subversive ways”. We’ve seen time and time again that player interaction often doesn’t turn out how developers intend, so it will be interesting to see how Gardens incentivizes the kind of behavior they’d like to see from players.

No word yet on how far into development the game actually is, and so far all we’ve seen of it is concept art — though the “timeless visual direction” mentioned on their website suggests that the in-game art may be done in a cartoon style similar to what’s already been revealed.

It’s certainly got style, and we really can’t wait to see that cat-porcupine-bear thing in action! When all the elements come together in a well-balanced way, PvPvE games can end up being some of the most memorable and enduring gaming experiences — one needs only to look at the longevity of games like World of Warcraft for proof. While recent experience has made us a little wary of getting too excited about games before they’re actually released, it’s going to be hard not to with this one.