What was removed
A 2025 interview presented the removal of mass PvP and territorial conquest as a design decision. On 4 October 2026, XLGAMES published concrete channel-based PvP rules without announcing their return.
Wccftech, introducing its interview with the development team on 1 August 2025, states that the game “has deliberately removed any mass PvP and territorial conquest elements to appeal to a PvE audience”. The team’s own answer in the same piece confirms the reasoning: those systems “didn’t translate well to our new direction—so rather than force them in, we chose to focus on features that support our vision of a character-driven, story-rich world”.
Those interview answers explain the design direction at that time. They do not mean all player-versus-player combat was removed: the official September 2026 publications explicitly describe smaller encounters.
Documented facts
The documented account
The developer diary of 10 October 2024 keeps three things: risk on trade runs that grows with the value of the journey, “an evolved crime system”, and “organized PvP activities, including arenas like the colosseum”.
The wording matters. The crime system and the arenas are introduced with the verb “exploring” — they are stated as intentions, not as shipped features, and no later official source has upgraded them.
In its 4 October 2026 Steam deep dive, XLGAMES finally states who can attack whom. Player attacks are forbidden in standard channels; in PvP channels, players can attack anyone outside their party and guild. The zone keeps the same monsters and quests. Players switch at a Nui Statue, with a cooldown.
The game assigns channels automatically: parties stay together across zones, and a player can join a friend elsewhere. A typical channel holds about 100 players, with some caps varying by purpose. This channel-level figure is not a whole-zone or server total. The 4 October announcement described PvP as open from the start of the demo. Ham’s 18 October letter now specifies the access point: leave the first town and reach the Nui Statue at your next destination. Access is earlier than in the normal game, but this does not mean fighting other players from character creation.
Context and limits
The 4 October post now states the attack and channel-switching rules, but gives no death penalties or detailed cap for every channel. It says there are currently no set objectives or scheduled battles. Trade-run and trade-post ideas remain early planning.