Massively^™

Saga, which bills itself as the "world's first collectible online real-time strategy game," is throwing wide its doors for Open Beta 2 starting today. You can head over to their site to sign up; they mention that account creation is not quite ready yet, but it might not be a bad idea to get your foot in the door. (And for what it's worth the sign-up form did allow me to create an account with no fuss. You can just ignore the "promo code" field.)

But what, you ask, is a collectible online RTS? We've only covered it once before on Massively, so I looked around the developer's site to see what they have. Here are some key points: it's an RTS (of course), but it's persistent, so you won't have to rebuild structures every match, and your units stay dead until made otherwise. The setting is standard fantasy. The game has no subscription fee, using a microtransaction model: players buy their troops in booster packs, which cost $2.95; the game itself is currently on pre-sale for $20. You can also trade troops with others, which highlights the "collectible" nature of this game. The site claims that they are aiming for a Q1 2008 release. I'm not so much an RTS player, but it is an interesting business model. Will you try it out?