Korveth is in Open Beta: Command a World That Fights Back

Today Korveth enters open beta. It is free, it runs in your browser, and there is nothing to install. Open a tab and you are commanding an army across a living 3D battlefield in seconds.

This post is the full briefing: what the game is, exactly how a match plays out, the engine underneath it, the two factions, and where we are taking it from here.

The pitch

Korveth is a real-time 3D strategy game about pressure and tempo. You bank energy, deploy units, fight for the capture nodes that fund your war, and try to break the enemy line before they break yours. It is built to read instantly and reward good decisions, not to bury you in systems.

The whole thing renders live on a custom engine in your browser. No launcher. No patch day. No thirty-gigabyte download. A link is the entire onboarding.

How a match plays

Every commander starts a match with 140 banked energy. Energy is the one resource, and everything you do spends it. It refills over time, and the rate you refill at depends entirely on how much of the map you hold.

There are four units, and learning when to commit each one is most of the game:

• Wisp (cost 20). A fast, fragile recon skimmer. Cheap enough to throw at empty ground early, quick enough to grab a node before the enemy arrives. It will not win a fight, but it will win you tempo.
• Lancer (cost 40). The backbone of any line. Balanced cost, range, and durability. When you do not know what you need, you need more Lancers.
• Bulwark (cost 90). A slow, heavily armored breaker. It soaks damage and cracks open a fortified node that a line of Lancers would die against. It is your battering ram.
• Railer (cost 110). Long-range siege artillery. Devastating reach, but helpless up close. A Railer behind a wall of Bulwarks is a problem. A Railer caught alone by a Wisp is a corpse.

Both factions field the same four archetypes. That is deliberate. A match is decided by your decisions, not by an unfair roster.

The five nodes

The map has five capture nodes, and they are the heart of the design:

1. Vanguard Citadel, the Vanguard Coalition home base.
2. Ashen Spire, the Ashen Pact home base.
3. The Crucible, dead center, the highest-income node on the field.
4. North Relay, out wide.
5. South Relay, out wide on the opposite flank.

Income flows from territory. Sitting on your base and doing nothing loses slowly, because the enemy is out there banking more energy than you. To build a real army you have to take ground, and taking ground means walking into where your opponent wants to fight.

The Crucible sits exactly between both bases and pays the most, so it is contested in nearly every match. The two relays pull armies wide and punish you for over-committing to the middle. There is no safe, passive route to victory. The map forces the fight.

Breaking the line

A node falls when you hold more contesting units inside its radius than the enemy does. So the texture of a Korveth match is a constant tug between three pressures: push the center for income, defend a relay you already captured, and probe for the moment the enemy line is thin enough to break.

Break the line and everything cascades. You take the node behind it, your income jumps, you can afford the Bulwarks and Railers that crack the next node, and the map starts falling your way. Lose your own line at the wrong moment and the same cascade happens to you. Up to 90 units can be alive on each side, so a late-game collapse is loud, fast, and final.

The engine

Korveth runs on an engine we wrote from scratch on WebGPU, the modern graphics API that finally gives the browser real access to the GPU.

That matters because it means the 3D world is not a gimmick layered on top of a board game. Terrain, units, capture rings, and effects are all instanced and drawn on the hardware, which is how a full battlefield stays smooth with hundreds of units moving and fighting at once. The same deterministic world seed renders the same battlefield everywhere, so what you see is what your opponent sees.

Browser-native is the bet, not a compromise. The web is the largest distribution surface that exists, and the hardware to run a real 3D strategy game on it is finally here. We built Korveth to prove that point.

The two factions

• The Vanguard Coalition believes in order through overwhelming initiative. Strike first, hold everything. They play forward and they play fast.
• The Ashen Pact believes in attrition as a strategy. Burn the map down to the nodes worth keeping. They are happy to trade and grind you out.

In open beta you take command of either faction against an adaptive AI commander that reads your openings and adjusts. It is not a fixed script. Beat it the same way twice and it will stop letting you.

What is next

Open beta is the start, not the finish. Here is the near-term plan:

• Live head-to-head. Real-time ranked matches against other commanders.
• Seasonal ladders. Ranked seasons with placement and rewards, plus replays so you can study the exact moment a line broke.
• More map and roster. New battlefields and additional archetypes that grow the strategic space while keeping the core readable.

The free edition is the full game: the whole map, both factions, all four units, and a place on the global ladder. Paid editions add depth and identity, never a pay-to-win edge.

Open a tab and take the field. We will see you on the map.