MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz was allowed to play Persist Online for the Grindfest theme week 2026 and discuss the zombie MMO with Benjamin Zuckerer (Managing Director of CipSoft and Lead Product Manager).
Layoffs, project cancelations, studio closures, price increases – currently, it is rarely enjoyable to follow the daily news from the gaming industry. All the more beautiful is it that a studio from Regensburg can completely navigate around the current crisis and celebrate the most successful era in its 25-year history.
I am, of course, talking about CipSoft, the creators of Tibia. We reported on the fact that 2025 was the most successful year in the studio’s history. A few days ago, Benjamin Zuckerer, one of the managing directors of CipSoft as well as the Lead Product Manager for Persist Online, told me that they will probably top that success this year.
While elsewhere employees are being laid off, CipSoft is hiring. About 20 people this year alone. Currently, there are around 120 people working for CipSoft, and the team is expected to grow even further in the future.
During this week, you can expect exciting articles every day about the topic MMORPG. Included: nostalgic retrospectives, exciting analyses from prominent industry veterans, previews of upcoming online role-playing games, and entertaining streams.
Here’s the program for the big MMORPG theme week 2026 from MeinMMO
However, they do not want to rest on their current success and the popularity of the MMO evergreen Tibia in Regensburg. Eventually, a second online role-playing game will join. The announcement of Persist Online occurred just over two years ago.
Persist Online is an online role-playing game that throws you into a hand-crafted urban zombie apocalypse and focuses on third-person action, survival, crafting, and guild battles over specific zones.
For our Grindfest theme week 2026, I was allowed to dive into the zombie apocalypse for the first time and then discuss my experiences with Benjamin.
Gentle introduction to a lethal world
When starting an alpha, beta, playtest, or early access version of an MMO for the first time, you never know what to expect. Just recently, many of the games that landed on my hard drive beforehand felt very raw and unfinished. You could tell at every corner that important systems and features were still missing that are actually part of the core gameplay experience.
Persist Online, in its current pre-alpha version, already develops a nice flow. First, a crisp single-player tutorial introduces important basics. Then you land in a stronghold protected by an NPC faction, where you are provided with new quests and objectives over the next few hours.
Through the quests, you gradually learn about the various tools and systems like crafting. Moreover, they take you step by step further away from the base. For understanding: The world of Persist Online is divided into rings that spread out from the first base. The further away, the higher the level of the ring. The higher the level, the more dangerous the enemies and the more valuable the loot and farmable resources.
Rather early on, Persist Online greets new players with a nicely staged in-game sequence that introduces the zombie setting and prepares you for the upcoming adventure. In the interview, I briefly discuss this with Ben, and he smiles:
“This is the first time we’ve done this in this form as a studio. And to spoil a bit about how long it takes to get this 1 minute and 30 seconds long clip at the beginning… it took about 6 months of work.” Comparable anecdotes can also be heard from much larger studios like Blizzard. Every second of CGI sequence is elaborate and expensive.
The first ring around the stronghold is not too difficult. With a few shots or blows, the undead fall defeated to the ground. With bandages and painkillers, you keep your health points at a healthy level.
However, one should not underestimate the brain munchers. They often appear in large numbers. One careless shot with the shotgun can attract an entire horde with the noise. The same goes for when a banshee lets out her shrill scream upon seeing you. In tight spaces such as a stairwell, you can quickly be overwhelmed by their numbers.
Later, you will also encounter armed raiders and potent mutants that make survival difficult—especially in their elite variants and when sudden harmful status effects hit you for which you have no appropriate counter.
A touch of Oblivion
That Persist Online develops a certain flow in the first hours is also due to character progression. It works like in, for example, Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion: you level up what you use. So if you use a particular type of weapon, such as a shotgun or an axe, you level up the corresponding areas, level up, and receive points that you can invest in skills and passive bonuses.
This same principle is applied not only to weapons but also to equipment, the essential stamina value, and all tools. So someone who fishes a lot improves their fishing skill gradually and can unlock a bonus for fish catches or shorten the fishing duration.
However, you can also pry open cars with a crowbar, gut animals with a knife, fell trees with an axe, pick locks with lock picks, and … and … and. There are a total of ten profession skills, and some even grant active skills that are very useful in fights. For example, you can only obtain a dodge skill through these perks – it is not available by default.
Character progression includes the unique equipment system of Persist Online. Ben explains it to us like this:
The items in our game—weapons, armor, etc.—are all unique. Every item that drops is one of a kind. You will not get the same item twice. […] The more interesting items come with modifications, with the quality determining the number of modifications. The interesting part is to build a setup where the items harmonize with each other as best as possible.
The mods are leveled up and unlocked while you play and use them in combat. […] This means I can improve my equipment while I play just by using it.
Benjamin Zuckerer in an interview with MeinMMO
This system is complemented by crafting, allowing players to create exactly the weapon or armor that brings the optimal values and modifications for their playstyle.
Such min-maxing opportunities can be found not only in equipment but also in professions like cooking. If you want to create the best possible buff food for the tricky endgame challenges, you work through a real chain of steps and meal refinements.
A safehouse that slows down the pace
Even though Persist Online has played quite smoothly in the first hours, there is a central feature that repeatedly interrupts the flow: the visit to the Junction Station in your home base. This is essentially the safehouse, a central place to place items from your inventory into storage, convert scrap into useful resources, craft items, upgrade equipment, and send characters on missions.
As soon as your inventory is full or you want to craft something, you run to the station, trigger a short loading screen, and land in a pure menu structure through which you access the various areas like the mission center, kitchen, forge, or armory. There you then perform actions, clean up the inventory, assign characters, and start tasks.
All areas can be improved over time to gain access to better equipment or make the workflow for each area more efficient. Missions, room upgrades, and all crafting productions take place in real time. During this time, the assigned character is blocked and is not available for a zombie hunt.
At first, I found this quite annoying. At that time, I only had one character, wanted to go out into the world again, and was looking at a 5-minute long timer. It was only later that I realized that I can bypass this artificial blockade through a quickly created second character. In conversation with Ben, I learn that Persist Online is designed for you to create a real family of heroes.
It is important to optimize your characters for different tasks. You can optimize one for PvP, one for resource farming, and one for PvE. You can basically optimize them for various things, and therefore you will likely play several characters at a high level in the medium term.
Benjamin Zuckerer in an interview with MeinMMO
Ben adds that the safehouse is still a huge work in progress and that much will happen there to ensure that this part of Persist Online is visually appealing, easy to understand, and a solid part of the tutorial phase.
Additionally, the developer explains that while you have to go through the quests with every character, leveling up still occurs significantly faster because later family members benefit from the established progress—such as access to much stronger equipment.
Throughout your adventure, you can join one of two NPC factions in the game. Each faction has an area of influence. A contested zone is located between the two combatants. You can fight on the side of allied NPCs against the other side in this zone and complete tasks for your team.
If you have earned enough with a faction in the later rings, you may, by the way, use their safehouse. Just for that, it is worth joining one of the factions and fulfilling their tasks.
Less Fortnite, more Tibia
When I first spoke with CipSoft about Persist Online two years ago, the Fortnite-esque look was still a topic. However, the visual style of the game has noticeably changed since then. The new cel-shading style fits well with the urban zombie setting, gives the game its own identity, and repeatedly hints at what must have happened there before the apocalypse and what could have happened to the inhabitants.
By the final launch, at least eight rings should be content-ready, and rings 9 and 10 may already be included, even if not with all planned challenges. According to Ben, it is already said that you may need one or two months to play through the current alpha content (depending on the pace and time investment per day).
I have no doubt that the scope will only continue to grow from here and that you can lose yourself in the game for months and years. With Tibia, the MMO experts at CipSoft have been showing for many years how well they understand how to draw the grind spiral into the virtually infinite.
As in Tibia, PvP is an important topic in Persist Online as well. Especially in special regions where guilds fight for dominance over the zone to gain advantages. Outside of these zones, you can disable the ability to harm other players. However, if you want to regularly do so, you can, but risk penalties up to being expelled from your own faction. But that’s not the end, as Ben explains:
If your karma becomes negative, it has consequences in the game world after a certain point. Most NPC factions in the game world are on the good side. […] They then open fire because they know that your character is evil due to having bad karma and having killed too many players. When you then die, you spawn at another location with a faction that is also evil and does nothing but hunt down survivors.
Benjamin Zuckerer in an interview with MeinMMO
If you want to improve your karma, be prepared for a longer grind and to take down a lot of zombies.
Step by step to the goal
According to Ben, all major core systems in Persist Online are integrated, and they are now working on implementing player feedback. Just recently, there was a comprehensive adjustment of the character progression and starting experience. In the upcoming playtest, the changes made will be thoroughly tested.
Only when all these fundamental systems are in place will the developers address detail areas such as the still improvable hit feedback or the sometimes still uneven animations. By the way, what already works: the hit zones. Headshots cause more damage!
If you would like to support the developers in the upcoming playtests, you can register for them on the official website or seek contact on the Discord channel of Persist Online.
If you want to conquer the contested sectors of the game world, you need a strong community. In Persist Online, you can create guilds, level them up progressively, and unlock useful advantages for your community. The maximum size of a guild is intended to be 50 players to prevent overpowered mass communities from dominating everything.
The first conclusion
Persist Online already generates a motivating flow of gameplay in the first hours that makes me look positively towards the release. The still very fresh zombie setting in the MMO genre and the stylish cel-shading look enhance my anticipation.
My biggest concern currently relates to the combat experience, as especially the melee weapons in the current version lack any form of weight and hit feedback. But my shotgun could also use a bit more oomph. If the developers can manage to make the fights enjoyable, Persist Online is likely to feel cozy on my hard drive for a long time.
Please note that Persist Online relies heavily on grinding and offers little variety outside of combat and resource farming. This is not a colorful theme park with story focus, diverse quests in the style of The Secret World, or countless side activities like pet fights or instanced PvE or PvP modes.
However, fans of rewarding grinding, advanced equipment, crafting, and skill systems, as well as guild conflicts over territories, should definitely keep an eye on Persist Online.
By the way, there is still no specific timeline for the release or open beta tests. The team wants to slowly but surely approach a state that makes it sensible to unleash a larger number of players on the servers through playtests. I will definitely be on board. You can find out what else is happening at Grindfest 2026 on MeinMMO here.
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