Have you ever had a really intense craving to play an MMORPG developed by a one-man team who goes by the name of Eskil Steenberg? Well this might be right up your alley! Love is an ultra-indie MMORPG that is being developed by one guy (see above), and it is so titled because of his "love" for game development. Either way, fans who have been holding their breathe for this innovative procedurally generated MMO may be tickled pink to hear that the game has now entered Open Beta, but with one catch.

In reality, that catch is quite a small one, but it is certainly worth addressing. Since Eskile Steenberg is, literally, one man developing this MMORPG, it sounds outright ridiculous to suppose that he could host an open beta test and actually support the hundreds, if not thousands of interested users. Instead, Eskil is asking that players ensure they can run the client first, and if they really want to partake in the open beta, he wants a small donation of 3 Euros (which is about $4.32 according to Google Currency!) in order to pay for the massive bandwidth required to sustain his servers. These 3 Euros, however, will only buy you 30 days of open beta testing, and Eskil is quick to remind players that a single-person developed MMO may not be up to the level of polish expected from blockbuster teams like Blizzard or Square Enix.

On the bright side, however, it's really only $4.32 to see what one man can do with an MMO and a lot of time. You can also check out ZAM's full coverage of the game we did almost half a year ago to catch a glimpse of what "Love" is all about.

When you think of independent game development, the MMO genre probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Indie games have a long and rich history in video games; everything from cult classics enjoyed by small niches of players to simple ideas that went on to be picked up by professional publishers. But historically, the MMO genre never really lent itself to indie development that well, especially in today's industry, where even the smallest ventures typically cost millions of dollars to produce and no fewer than a dozen people to develop.

In Sweden, there is a programmer who refused to accept that the MMO industry was off-limits to the indie crowd. His name is Eskil Steenberg, and he's the sole developer behind Love, an artistically-inspired indie MMO that you're going to start hearing a lot about in the months to come, if you haven't already. Steenberg created Love "for the love of game development," hence its title. Love isn't about killing rats or gearing up to raid endgame content; it's a "procedurally generated" MMO that relies on sophisticated code to dynamically populate the game world with content based, in part, on your actions as a player.