MMO Nether wants to know how you’d survive the apocalypse (preview)

Chip Sineni did the best he could as my tour guide. He left his character for a moment to zoom out of the map, showing me just how much destruction the apocalypse had brought to the city. Unfortunately, that meant he wasn’t paying attention when creatures suddenly appeared and attacked him mercilessly until he died. He started over, but they killed him again just a few minutes later. The monsters weren’t backing down.

The director and cofounder of Phosphor Games Studio was trying to show Nether, a first-person massively multiplayer online (MMO) survival game for PC. It takes place 10 years after a mysterious event called The Cull wiped out most of humanity. The few survivors left have to fight for scraps while being chased by nethers, mutated creatures that use teleportation to find you. One of its inspirations is DayZ, a popular and ruthless zombie mod for PC military shooter Arma II (that’s also coming as its own PC game).