Northern Michigan University alumnus and Marquette local, Silas Talley, helped host an Open Beta Launch Party at Northern Michigan University’s eSports Lab on Nov. 9 for the new online game, REVN, developed by Ambitious Games.

Talley, creative director at Ambitious Games and REVN creator, founded the company in 2016. Ambitious Games is an independent game-development studio based in Marquette. In 2017, Talley and the Ambitious team began working on REVN, a free-to-play third-person MOBA video game.

MOBA stands for multiplayer online battle arena.

Talley earlier released the Closed Alpha — a small sample — of REVN, but now is releasing the Open Beta — a playable game for the public — to personal computer gamers.

REVN is a new video game developed by Ambitious Games. One of the developers is Northern Michigan University alumnus Silas Talley. (Photo courtesy of Ambitious Games)

Talley started the company with his partner, John Rapavi of Appleton, Wisconsin.

Rapavi said he and Talley have been working on REVN for the past four years through various stages.

“You’ve got two teams that are trying to attack and defend a base on either side of the map,” Talley said, “and it’s a competitive team game, so you try and work with your team of five players.”

According to Ambitious Games, REVN allows players to craft a variety of items and weapons, select special ablities and fully customize their characters. The goal for the player is to defend their core while destroying enemies by any means necessary.

Each player can have a unique experience with different equipment, abilities and playing styles.

A main feature of REVN is the competitive online multiplayer aspect, which challenges opponents to high-intensity matches in which players fight to defeat one another or capture terminals to increase resources used to overpower the other team.

Allister MacGregor, community manager for Ambitious Games and an NMU student majoring in English, helps with live streams, community outreach and other duties. As part of the outreach, MacGregor was at the launch party.

“The goal here is to really just introduce the game to some people who might be interested in checking it out,” MacGregor said. “We’ve got a lot of people locally from Marquette on the dev (development) team. We’ve also got some remote people on the dev team, so we thought it’d fun if we just had everybody come down here and kind of meet up and see if there’s any students who were interested in trying the game.”

The developers have been internally testing and “alpha testing,” he said, with about 500 people having tried REVN.

“Now we are opening the floodgates,” said MacGregor, who noted the game is available for free on Early Access on Steam.

Paying players, however, will have the ability to purchase “cosmetics,” he said, with more “skins” and other items being developed that people can buy.

“We’re really trying to get more people into the game, more people interested in playing regularly because we’ve got to make it so people can find matches more easily,” MacGregor said.

Talley said REVN will be updated for the next few years before a new game is created.

“It’s a very community-driven game, so we like to get people involved,” Talley said. “We’ve got ideas for how the game can be improved, or bugs you find. We operate a very active Discord server, which is kind of a community hub where people can come in and chat with us about the game.”

For more information on REVN, visit ambitious.games.