Wild West Online's Engine Choice Sparks Drama

If you go to the official FAQ on Wild West Online's official website right now, the following vague statement is given in regards to to game's choice of engine.

We are using a proprietary licensed engine, designed and developed specifically for open world online games, and we'll cover our technology in more details in the coming months. The engine rendering is DirectX 11 based.

In a now-deleted Reddit post, a user named TheSkiesAreShattered seems to have claimed to know which engine they used. Spoilers, it's the same engine that Free Reign Entertainment used for its games Last Man Standing, Romero's Aftermath, Shattered Skies, the last of which the user's username clearly references.

Given the history of Free Reign Entertainment, its name is regarded somewhat like Voldemort's. The moment you mention it, the pitchforks come out. So if the engine weren't enough to cause baseless concern, as it's only an engine, TheSkiesAreShattered seems to have gone a step further and alleged that the use of Free Reign's engine clearly meant that Sergey Titov and/or Free Reign had funded the game. You may remember that Wild West Online's developers were recently given enough funding that they could skip Kickstarter altogether and this claim appears to be related to that announcement.

Now, the exact nature of this post are conjecture, given that the post has been deleted—along with the user's account itself—and I can't seem to find an archive of it, but the conclusions drawn are what I've pieced together from what's left.

A video by YouTuber BigfryTV remains, however, and he offers some evidence that he believes could support the theory that Free Reign is involved somehow. All of this seems very circumstantial, but what he dug up is as follows.

• The Wild West Online forum looks a lot like the Shattered Skies forum.
• Stephan Bugaj and Sergey Titov are Facebook friends.
• DJ2 Entertainment, Wild West Online's publisher, worked on Romero's Aftermath and Hawken. The latter is said to be significant because some of Hawken's developers went on to work on the Free Reign-published FPS Burstfire.
• Burstfire also used Free Reign's engine, known as the Nightshade Engine, and it ended up being published by Free Reign.

In response to all of these claims, one of Wild West Online's developers posted the following message on the game's official forums.

This one is simple. DJ2 have licensed engine from Free Reign Entertainment, as it was only engine available for licensing that was built from the ground and suitable to run online open world game and one that allowed us to achieve what we already achieved in a short time.

Since this topic generated so much interest we will release more detailed response later today.

But please do not trust anything you read on reddit

Given the history of Free Reign's games and their buggy nature, many were skeptical. The same moderator followed up with another statement that directly denies Sergey Titov's involvement in development, instead saying that 612 Games is simply using their engine. The statement is as follows.

1. MMO Engine is more than just a fancy rendering. It's about databases, backend scripts, etc. We've evaluated Unreal and it turned out we will need to spend over a year adding those features, while Free Reign offered it out of the box.

2. And response NO, Sergey Titov is not involved in development of the game, but yes we use game engine developed and supported by one of his companies. And this is why we believe that more detailed response in in order to provide full transparency.

A more thorough statement on the matter is said to be on the way later today, so we'll have to wait until then to see what the connection is, but I don't believe at this time that there really is a deeper connection. If all you can find is that the two guys are Facebook friends or that the forums look similar, which could simply be because they use similar software or even, in a reverse twist, could be because part of DJ2's work on Romero's Aftermath involved setting up the forum, which Free Reign then adapted for Shattered Skies' website, I'm quite a bit far from inclined to believe that what you're trying to say is happening is actually happening.

For now, all we can do is wait for an official statement.