01 · Structure
Group content without combat
Loftia has no combat. It still has dungeons. The studio's answer to that apparent contradiction is
the clearest piece of design thinking it has published anywhere, and it is not on the FAQ.
In a conventional MMO the dungeon is a container: a closed space, a group, a sequence of fights,
a loot table. Strip out the fights and you would expect the container to collapse. The developers
argue the opposite — that the fight was never the point. What makes group content group content,
in their account, is that several people take on a challenge that none of them could clear alone,
and that requires coordination rather than damage numbers.
“we'll be calling the mid adventures and Grand Adventures so they'll be uh group content with a Twist in that loftier will not have combat”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
The resulting content is called an Adventure, with longer runs called Grand Adventures.
They are built out of puzzle solving and platforming rather than encounters: the group reads a space,
works out an order of operations, and executes it together. The studio points at co-operative puzzle
games and at the shrine-style challenge rooms in recent open-world titles as the closest reference
points — small, legible, self-contained problems rather than corridors of enemies.
“they will consist of quite a bit of puzzle solving and also platforming and obviously utilize teamwork uh to tackle those challenges together”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Difficulty is a dial rather than a wall. Adventures come in differing difficulty levels, which lets
the same system serve two audiences the studio keeps naming: players who want to be pushed, and
players who are here to farm, decorate and log off. Because the challenge is mechanical rather than
statistical, a harder Adventure does not simply mean enemies with more health — it means a room
that asks more of the group's attention. Rewards sit on top, so there is a reason to run them beyond
the room itself.
Progression, and the refusal to make a grind
The second structural decision is that progression is deliberately plural. Instead of one character
level that gates everything, each activity carries its own track: cooking, seed making, furniture
crafting, resource gathering, and even how cleanly a group clears an Adventure.
“so we plan on uh having a skill system that covers all the facets of loftiest gameplay so I see a couple of people mentioning it in the chat as well but there'll be a skill level for cooking a skill level for uh seed making uh crafting furniture for more resource Gathering”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Crucially, the tracks do not compete. A player who likes cooking and furniture both is not asked to
choose a class. The cost of breadth is time rather than exclusion, and the system is explicitly
designed to route around specialisation: if you cannot craft the piece of furniture you want, you can
hand the materials to someone whose furniture track is higher and have them make it. That single
design choice turns progression into a reason to talk to other players instead of a reason to
compare numbers with them.
The studio is unusually direct about what it is trying to avoid. Grinding, defined as time spent doing
something you do not want to do because the game has made it compulsory, is named as a thing that
will never be the goal.
“it's something we want to stay away from as far as grinding is stuff that you don't necessarily want to do but feel kind of obligated to do it um that is definitely never ever going to be our goal”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
The mechanism that makes that promise credible is the server-wide project. Rather than looping the
same daily quest, the community pools materials into shared builds — a shop, a dome, a renewable
energy site — and each finished project unlocks more content and more story. Farming and crafting
therefore have somewhere to go that is not a vendor. The stated intent is that the economy of effort
closes: what you make is consumed by something everyone can see.
“apart from saying that it's it's a it's a system that will really encourage everyone to work together towards a goal”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
One consequence worth stating plainly: this model makes content arrive on the community's schedule
rather than a patch calendar. The studio frames that as an improvement on the quarterly update cycle
of older MMOs. It also means a quiet server progresses more slowly than a busy one, which is a
trade-off the team acknowledges rather than hides.
World size is not the goal
Asked how large the map will be, the answer declines the premise. The city is already described as
large and still expanding, but area is not the metric the team optimises for.
“isn't our uh number one goal um it's more to create uh content that will provide like more hours of fun”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Read together with the Adventure design, that produces a coherent picture: dense, hand-authored
spaces that reward a group, rather than a wide map that rewards a mount.
02 · Infrastructure
How the online layer is actually built
“Can a small team ship an MMO?” is the question every backer asks privately. The engineering answer
is the least romantic and most convincing thing the studio has said: most of it is rented.
Loftia runs on Unreal Engine, with account and authentication services taken from Epic Online
Services — the same stack Epic uses for its own shooter — and world state, item storage and
instance management running on Amazon's cloud. The engineering lead's framing is that the hardest
problems in the specification were already solved by companies with more engineers than the studio
has employees, and the team's job is to assemble rather than invent.
“two of the biggest ones would be of course epic games who built Unreal Engine that makes everything that we do easier and then Amazon and we're very heavily into their Cloud infrastructure”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
The sharding model is worth spelling out because it explains a design decision elsewhere on this
site. The world is split: the city sits on one server, player housing is an instance spun up
dynamically on another, and items live in cloud storage that both can read. Moving between them is
not a loading screen in the traditional sense so much as a handoff.
Capacity claims are usually vapour, so the specific number matters. Before the campaign the team ran
a concurrent load test in a single server instance.
“we've already run scalability tests with 150 players concurrently in a single little server um and everything was working great”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Servers will be regionally distributed, with the final distribution following the player base, and
players are not locked to the one they first join.
“we'll have regionally distributed servers so that you can have a good gameplay experience without high pings and so there will be servers located in the United States in Europe in Southeast Asia”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
An economy with a wall down the middle
Trading is confirmed at a basic level, and a player-run market district is one of the campaign's
stretch goals: stalls in the city, walk up, browse, buy. The more interesting decision is what is
allowed to circulate.
“at a minimum there'll be a basic trading functionality and that will in itself already drive a base level of a player driven economy”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Anything bought with real money — from the store or from the campaign — stays untradable, and
anything earned in game cannot be bought for cash. The studio's stated reason is not aesthetic but
structural: without that wall, a player could convert money into market currency and the game would
become pay-to-win by proxy.
“store bought items will remain store-bought and they will not be tradable and items that are obtainable in-game will only be obtainable in game”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
The store itself is described as cosmetics only, and the team names two mechanics it will not use.
“certainly there's no like loot boxes or gotcha or any of those types of operations”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
There is an explicit no-exclusivity promise attached to cosmetics as well: if a pet or a hat exists
in the store, an earnable equivalent exists in the game. That is a stronger commitment than “no
pay-to-win” and it is the kind of claim that can be checked after launch, which is presumably why it
was said.
03 · Unsettled
The questions that got “not yet”
A studio's unfinished decisions are more informative than its finished ones. These are the answers
that stopped short of a commitment — collected here so that nothing below is mistaken for a
confirmed feature.
Voice acting
NPC dialogue has no decision attached. Voice acting has not been ruled out, but it has not been
designed either, and the team floated the middle path used by life-sim games — text plus
non-linguistic vocal sounds — as an alternative. Anyone writing “fully voiced” into a preview is
ahead of the source.
“we don't have a definitive answer for that just yet uh at the current stage uh We've we haven't thought too much about voice acting yet”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Pets
This one is settled. Pets exist, the first revealed is a dog, and cats, rabbits and further species
are under discussion. Pets can be dressed — the studio mentions hats specifically — and
friendship with them is a progression track of its own.
“yes a big yes to pets um I think pets was one of the first things people like yes we need pets in loftia”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Lore
A substantial body of world lore is written and held back. The studio's reasoning is that publishing
it now creates an obligation it may need to break later, so the setting will be delivered through
environment and gameplay instead of a codex. That is a design statement as much as a scheduling one.
“yes uh yes there will it is uh we can't shed too much on that one”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Where the name came from
The project's working title was an acronym assembled from four other games, which the team now
repeats as a joke at its own expense. The final name came from “loft”, with an ending chosen because
it made the word sound like a place.
“eventually uh just uh saw some suggestions that referenced the word Loft and then realized that adding I onto the end of it uh makes made it sound like a place and really cozy nice befitting place at that”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
How the studio started
Not as a company with a plan. Two founders played a farming game during the pandemic, found the
genre new to them, and wanted a version of it with a persistent shared world. The audience that
followed was not anticipated.
“we had no expectations when we started we just wanted to uh create a really cool game”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
Campaign rewards after the campaign
Kickstarter-exclusive cosmetics stay exclusive permanently — they will not be resold later. Game
keys, the art book, the soundtrack and physical items are the stated exceptions. Backers get a short
window after the campaign closes to raise their pledge tier.
“Kickstarter exclusive rewards are going to be remaining Kickstarter exclusive meaning that they're only available as part of the campaign”
Qloud Games developer Q&A — loftia.gg, accessed 2026-10-20.
How much weight to give all of this
Spoken answers are weaker evidence than a written policy. They are given under time pressure, they
mix aspiration with commitment, and the studio says as much itself when it declines to promise
cross-play or an early release. Treat the structure above as the plan and the specifics as
provisional; where this site states something as fact, it is backed by a written first-party page
rather than a sentence in a livestream.