Controversial Kickstarted Sandbox MMO DreamWorld Launches Into Early Access

The vast, self-proclaimed infinite open world of DreamWorld is now available for you to explore and build on as the Kickstarted sandbox MMO officially enters early access. The game promises a massive single world environment that can support millions of players at once.

DreamWorld’s colorful fantastical landscape and visuals are reminiscent of games like Fortnite and Realm Royale with a voxel-based building and terraforming system made up of a huge collection of building objects and decorations to tie it all together.

While it looks all perfectly legit from the outside, the game’s development history isn’t exactly a pretty one. DreamWorld was Kickstarted back in March 2021 by a pair of garage developers with a sob story about how one of the devs, Zachary Kaplan, lost his job due to COVID-19 and was dumped by his fiancée after the fact which led to the creation of the extremely ambitious game using stock assets.

The story was apparently enough to get people to back the game to the tune of over $64,000, a great deal more than their initial $10,000 funding goal. The developers also claimed that they received investments from startup funding company YCombinator, a Twitch co-founder, and a Google senior vice-president. After funding, the pair pulled all videos and interviews from the internet and their Discord went silent which naturally had backers thinking that they were scammed.

This was before Aislee Evans, the ex- fiancée, revealed in a YouTube video that Kaplan had been working on the game months before she broke the engagement off, accusing the developer of lying and using “emotional marketing” to secure funds for the project which Kaplan surprisingly admitted to.

Evans, however, assured backers that Kaplan and his co-founder would never scam backers and run off with the money, whether they’re able to pull it off is another matter entirely. “I can guarantee that these boys are not trying to scam anyone,” she said. “They truly believe that they are going to deliver on everything that they have promised. This is not two guys who purposefully came up with a project that they knew they weren’t going to be able to do just so that they could get a quick payday from Kickstarter and then disappear with this money.”

“They really, truly believe that they can make this happen,” she added. “However, whether they can deliver on it or not, like, again, I can’t speak to that and I’m not going to because I don’t have that gaming development technical background.”

Fast forward to nearly a-year-and-a-half later and DreamWorld is now in early access with a $25 price tag. The game and the studio’s dramatic history though has definitely put me off from putting money in the game, but in all honesty the game looks pretty good based on the latest gameplay video below.