The game we are making has a name: World Beyond Gods.
Until today it went by a working title. That title is retired, and everything from here on carries the real one. This post is about what the name means, because in this game the name is not a slogan. It is the oldest fact in the world.
When the gods left
Long ago, the gods left. We are not telling you why yet, because that story is still being written. What we can tell you is what their leaving did: the sky stopped turning.
The sun stands where it stood on that day, and it stood at a different hour over each land. Over the highlands of the Hornbound it hangs low in the west-south-west, a warm late-afternoon sun that throws long shadows across the terraces and lights the dust in the air. They call it the Long Ember. Over the coast of the Tidecrowned it stands high and cool behind a thin veil of sea cloud, and the shadows are short and soft. That is the Pale Noon.
Neither hour has moved since. The ring across the southern sky, the Girdle, holds still too, and so do the two moons beside it. Only the clouds and the weather move.
Beyond, not without
The name is not about absence. It is about what came after.
The gods left, and the world went on. The peoples who remained learned to keep time without a turning sky. The Hornbound read the hour from the shadows of their horn spires, which never move. The Tidecrowned read it from the tide, the one thing in their world that still does.
They grew their towns out of the land and the sea: ribbed halls of bone and hide in the highlands, spiral-shell towers and coral terraces on the coast. Neither people is human, and nothing they make is cut square. A world beyond gods is their world: one that went on, held at its hour.
There are older things too. In both lands, and in the Seam between them where the amber hour turns to pearl, stand ruins from before the leaving: fallen rib arches half buried in the highland dust, broken whorls sinking into the coastal chalk. Nobody builds in the Seam. Those ruins are older than the held sky.
What tears the sky
A held sky is a still sky, and something has begun to wound it. Over every farming valley hangs a Rift: a faint violet scar that hums while it sleeps and wakes when you fight beneath it. The more you kill under it, the angrier it grows, until its creatures fall from the sky and its boss comes down into the open world.
Violet is the Rift’s colour, and it belongs to neither land. Nothing that grows in the highlands or on the coast wears it, so when you see violet, you know what you are looking at. The Rifts are where the world fights back, and they are where most of its treasure comes from.
WBG for short
The full name is World Beyond Gods, and that is how we will write it wherever there is room. Where there is not, on a small button, a tag or a file name, you will see WBG.
What comes next
Our next posts walk through the two lands and how Early Access will work. If you want to know the day the game opens, sign up for the launch mail on this site: one mail when Early Access opens, and nothing more unless you ask for it.
