Warborne Above Ashes is an MMO PvP set in a post apocalyptic era. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the demo, and more.
Everything We Know About Warborne Above Ashes
Warborne Above Ashes Plot
Warborne: Above Ashes is set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world where players take on the role of "Driftmasters"—customizable characters navigating a fractured, resource-scarce land. While the playtest does not feature any narrative or campaign elements, the game appears to be built around factional conflict, territorial control, and large-scale battles rather than a traditional storyline.
Warborne Above Ashes Gameplay
Warborne Above Ashes is a large-scale PvP-focused MMO with action combat and territory-based mechanics. Players align with one of six factions, each offering unique bonuses that impact playstyle. You control a Driftmaster and build up your character by upgrading gear, leveling up, and investing in both combat and utility-based systems.
Combat includes a mix of weapon-based abilities, class-recommended gear types, and cooldown-based skill usage. Players can also upgrade their central hub (known as the Driftmark) and take part in resource gathering, trading, and crafting. The world is open and features a sector-based map where factions vie for control.
Warborne Above Ashes Release Date
As of now, no official release date has been announced. The latest playtest went live on April 24, 2025, and further tests or a full launch timeline have not yet been confirmed by the developers.
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Warborne Above Ashes Review (Playtest)
A Shiny Battlefield, but Still a Prototype
Some games like to whisper their ambition, Warborne Above Ashes doesn't. This game prides itself as a 24/7 large-scale PvP MMO battles. No rest, no off-hours, no come back tomorrow when the servers refresh. This is war, apparently, all the time. So, naturally, I jumped in with a mix of curiosity, skepticism, and the kind of excitement usually reserved for new tech toys with way too many blinking lights.
Right away, Warborne makes one thing clear—it’s not here to coddle you with storybook intros or dramatic lore drops. No long-winded monologues, no tragic hero arcs, no "you are the chosen one" set up. It drops you straight into the thick of systems. Menus. Factions. UI elements that practically beg to be clicked, even if you’re not quite sure what half of them do yet. It’s like walking into a war council meeting with no name tag—you’re in, but also very much not caught up.
To be fair, that’s not unusual for MMOs that lean into massive PvP. Narrative usually ends up duct-taped somewhere near the back, if it’s there at all. But even mobile MMORPGs these days manage to cough up some kind of framing device. A reason to be here. Warborne doesn’t bother, and while that might appeal to the crowd that wants to skip to the meat, it’s still worth mentioning.
So yes, it’s shiny. It's fast. But is it all prototype right now? Very much so. That said—there’s something oddly compelling about being handed the keys to a chaotic, faction-fueled battlefield and be told, simply, "Figure it out."
Systems First, Questions Later
Warborne Above Ashes is unapologetically gameplay-first, and I mean that in the most literal way possible. No cutscenes, no characters speaking in cryptic monologues, not even a "war broke out because X betrayed Y" baseline. You log in, and boom—tabs, upgrades, menus, stats, loadouts.
Now, don’t get me wrong—I respect the commitment to systems. Really. I’ve played enough MMOs to know that when the gears are polished and the economy’s balanced, you can get away with quite a bit of narrative handwaving. But even mobile MMOs, the ones desperate to sell you bundles with sparkly wings, usually muster the effort to give you a short cinematic and a world-ending villain. It makes you wonder: is this a bold choice or just an oversight?
For now, it leans toward the former—a decision made with confidence. The devs clearly want players to dive straight into the guts of the game, not sit through exposition. And sure, some folks will love that. But as someone who likes even a whisper of context before being handed a sword and a war to win, I felt just a little adrift. Not lost, exactly, but… unanchored.
There’s a big world here. I can see that already. But with no narrative scaffolding to guide me, every choice—every upgrade, every faction, every direction on the map—felt like a guess, not a decision. It’s an odd way to start a game that’s supposedly about massive, ongoing war. War over what, exactly? I'm still not sure. But I guess the game trusts you'll care more about how you fight than why.
Driftmasters, Factions, and the Depth That Isn’t Quite There Yet
If Warborne isn’t going to hold your hand, then at least it gives you a decently sharp blade. You play as a Driftmaster—your core character, your customizable shell, your everything. From the Driftmark (your hub or base of operations), you level up, tweak gear, build out your loadouts, and upgrade facilities. And I’ll say this much: the progression system feels solid. There’s a real backbone to it, something deliberate and sturdy beneath the menus. You upgrade yourself, you upgrade your weapons, and you upgrade the Driftmark that feeds your war machine. It's looped well enough that I didn’t feel like I was grinding—I was expanding.
The economy? Surprisingly fair. I chose the Magnates faction, which admittedly slants things in your favor. With a +10% boost to token gains from the trading house and a +5% XP buff from mobs, the early game practically threw rewards at me. It wasn’t just generous—it was stable, which in an MMO is practically a love letter. Prices didn’t feel predatory, and I never felt the urge to hoard out of fear of being scammed by the system. It’s hard to say if this will hold up once the full market kicks in, but for a playtest, it’s more than promising—it’s functional.
Combat-wise, Warborne gives you a buffet of characters and weapons, each with their own skills and affinities. There’s synergy here, the kind of RPG logic veterans will feel right at home with: intelligence-based characters pair naturally with casting weapons, brawlers love strength-based kits, and there’s even nuance in how skills layer on top of weapons versus native abilities. You’re not just picking gear—you’re building a playstyle. And in PvP-centric games, that kind of layering is everything. It's just a shame the game doesn’t go out of its way to explain it upfront.
Leveling starts off with a sprint—quick progress, satisfying power gains, the usual honeymoon phase. But once I hit around level 15, or Tier 5, the brakes started to kick in and I began to notice the gap between systems that looked deep and ones that were deep. It’s not quite a plateau, but it’s definitely a shift. Enough to make you start asking, "Okay… now what?"
I mentioned the faction I chose before, there are six factions in total, each with distinct buffs and playstyles, like different flavors of PvP-purposed Kool-Aid. Here’s the short tour:
⚫︎ Ashen
+5% Demolition Power
+2.5% Max HP
⚫︎ Sirius
+5% Loot Token Regen
+5% Damage to Mobs
⚫︎ Emberwild
+5% Mount Movement Speed
+10% Animal Resource Yield
⚫︎ Shroud
+1.5% Skill Cooldown Speed
+5m Night Vision
⚫︎ Magnates
+10% Token Gains from Trading House Sales
+5% XP from Mobs
⚫︎ Ironcreed
+10% Research Speed
+7.5% Yield from Tech Wrecks and Trees
On paper? This setup is genuinely interesting. Each faction has purpose, flavor, and potential for varied metas depending on what kind of warband you’re running. There’s even an underground market system and player-led "Warband" within each faction—guild-style setups with their own power games. But here's the thing: despite the rich setup, I never felt the factions clashing in meaningful ways. Not yet. Maybe it’s the scale of the map, maybe it’s a playtest limitation, or maybe it’s just too early in the game’s lifecycle—but the promised tension between these six identities felt more like a quiet border dispute than an all-out war.
It’s like walking into a chess tournament and seeing everyone still setting up their boards. You can sense what’s coming… but for now, it's all just potential.
So… Where’s the War?
I kept waiting for the battlefield to erupt. After all, that’s the whole pitch, right? Warborne Above Ashes isn’t shy about advertising itself as a 24/7 large-scale PvP MMO. It's the phrase you’ll see on trailers, Steam pages—the lifeblood of its identity. So naturally, after sorting out my gear, aligning with a faction and Warband, and carving my way through the early game, I did what any PvP-hungry player would do, I went looking for the war. Except… I couldn’t find it.
There were skirmishes, sure. There were zones on the map that looked like they were built for PvP chaos. I even ran into the occasional player doing the same confused dance as me, half-battling mobs, half-wondering if we were about to get jumped by a rival factions. But the sweeping, coordinated, faction-vs-faction conflict I expected? Nowhere in sight. I kept moving toward the center of the map like some kind of MMO pilgrim, thinking maybe the core of the world would reveal the real action—the siege engines, the war cries, the promised storm.
Instead, I found more leveling zones. More gathering nodes. More potential. Now, look—this was a playtest. Maybe the large-scale PvP features simply weren’t live yet. Maybe they’re gated behind a milestone I haven’t reached yet. Maybe the devs are rolling it out slowly to stress-test the servers before throwing us into the meat grinder. That would make sense. But here’s the thing: when your entire identity revolves around always-on war, and your early access experience doesn’t showcase any of it, you’re left wondering whether the marketing is getting ahead of the mechanics.
And that affects the vibe of everything else. Without that active pressure from enemy factions, the world feels less reactive. My faction bonuses felt like passive perks (which they are) instead of strategic decisions. The resource flow felt good, but there was no urgency to it. I was leveling and building and unlocking, but not defending, not contesting, not racing against anyone. The systems were there—they just weren’t colliding.
I don’t mind a slow start. I don’t need instant chaos. But if Warborne is going to sell itself on endless PvP, it needs to deliver on that chaos—or at least hint that it’s coming. Otherwise, all this solid groundwork just feels like a lobby for a match that hasn’t started yet.
Promising, but Still Surface Level
You know that feeling when you unwrap a shiny new toy, the kind that looks like it has a hundred features and buttons and moving parts—but after twenty minutes, you’ve already pressed them all? That’s what Warborne Above Ashes feels like right now.
There’s no denying the playtest offers an impressive skeleton. The Driftmaster system is robust, the economic tuning (at least for my Magnates run) feels refreshingly fair, and the moment-to-moment gameplay has teeth. Factions have flavor, gear builds invite tinkering, and the map hints at a bigger plan. It's enough to keep your hands busy and your brain engaged for a good while.
But scratch the surface and you’ll find… well, more surface. Many of the systems, though well-built, still feel like scaffolding for a future game rather than components of a full experience. The faction warfare, which should be the game’s defining heartbeat, is absent or under wraps. The leveling curve slows just as things start getting interesting. And the lack of any narrative— even a light one—leaves the world feeling like a sandbox without any toys in it yet.
That doesn’t mean I’m out. Far from it. There’s something here. Enough promise that I’ll keep an eye on the updates, maybe even roll a new Driftmaster on a different server. But this is a game that feels more like a blueprint than a battlefield right now—a beautiful war machine with its gears still waiting to turn.
And hey, sometimes the best sieges are the ones that take a little longer to build. Let’s just hope Warborne remembers to light the match when the time comes.
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Warborne Above Ashes Product Information
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| Title | WARBORNE ABOVE ASHES |
|---|---|
| Release Date | TBA |
| Developer | Pumpkin Studio |
| Publisher | Qooland Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | MMORPG, PvP |
| Number of Players | Solo, Multiplayer (Server Limit) |
| ESRB Rating | N/A |
| Official Website | Warborne Above Ashes Official Website |
