Nether is a sandbox survival MMOFPS without a zombie in sight

The huge success of games like DayZ have encouraged a slew of first-person multiplayer survival games. In development at Phosphor Games, Nether aims to bring a different kind of environment to the genre: a dense, vertical city.

"The city being so vertical and three-dimensional and dense really is a very different gameplay experience,” creative director Chip Sineni told PC Gamer. "A lot of our guys were big fans of DayZ early on… but they’re very complementary kinds of games. It’s not like one kind of game is necessarily better than another, they’re just very different kinds of experiences."

The game faces the challenge of making this environment not feel too cluttered nor too isolated. "There’s just so much foliage and rubble and debris that we’re trying to figure out how we make it work. It’s very easy in a dense city to just hide," Sineni said. "In our game it’s very easy for someone to be very close to you, but you’re behind some garbage so they can’t see you."

Nether will have voice chat support built in to allow players to communicate with each other easily. This might come in handy when you have the Nether on your tail, hulking mutants that hunt by sound and can teleport around the map to hunt you relentlessly.

"We wanted it to be where even one creature is something to be terrified about if you don’t have the gear," Sineni said. "In some ways, it’s a multiplayer horror game, where there’s something out there."

Check out the first trailer for Nether below:

You can sign up now to play the Nether Beta.