Dear skyfarers,
We have made the decision to delay Airship: Kingdoms Adrift’s Early Access release to be in the Q2 of 2023. More specific date and time will be updated in the later stage and we also have some updates on the development to let you know.
After several testing periods, we have received tons of constructive feedback that has given us ideas and ways to improve our game. When considering the readiness to the original Early Access plan, we have concluded that it will be better to let our dev team have more extended time to develop and polish some features before let wider audiences playing the game so they can have a better experience and understanding of our game and our goal as we might have hope for.
What have we planned to do next?
These are important factors that steered us into this decision. As we have observed feedback, suggestions and looking back into our team. Here is what we plan to do during this extended time we have from delaying Early Access.
1. Revising the Tutorial system
It’s obvious that our game can be overwhelming for many newcomers, especially those who are not familiar with this genre. About 90% of feedback we’ve received mention tutorials, though some may not point it out to the tutorial directly. But we understand that we can ease their confusion and overwhelming feelings with more user-friendly tutorials. With this in mind, to work on improving the tutorial will require a lot of work on the system, especially the designing process. We hope everyone will get to enjoy skyfaring and have the best time with their airship. So tutorials will definitely be one of our main priorities.
The working in progress of revising a new tutorial system
2. Industry feature
Industry feature is one of the core gameplay of Airship: Kingdoms Adrift that will make your skyfaring adventure unique and get you to immerse yourself into the world of Europa better than before. Since we have done mostly the battle part so far, we have seen that some players might have misunderstood Airship: Kingdoms Adrift to be mainly focused on the action element, especially the battle and upgrading the airship. But trading and upgrading facilities in each port is also a huge part of the gameplay. With industry features coming, you will get to create the line of product manufacturing where you can manage and trade depending on the demand and supply of each port and town. You will have to gather some insight from the story or by visiting each port yourself to learn about the demand and price of each product to be able to gain the best profit. This feature will let you enjoy the trading simulation side of Airship: Kingdoms Adrift and allow you to have alternative choices of earning in the game.
The working in progress of industry and manufacturing feature
3. Fleet management and fleet battle system
At the current stage of Airship: Kingdoms Adrift, you can control and manage your airship only one build at a time. But in our plan, you will get to manage and control up to 3 airships in your fleet. This feature will immensely change your experience with your airship control, especially in the battle. To control 3 airships at a time, you will need to recruit more officers to join you on board each airship to assist you and you will need to be more strategic when it comes to leading your fleet into the battle and to protect your flagship.
The working in progress of fleet battle system in PVP mode
4. Balancing
As Airship: Kingdoms Adrift has developed and expanded. Balancing is always an important issue that we cannot overlook. We’ve received a lot of feedback from our community that helps point things out to us on where we could improve to make the game fun and fair to everyone in every mode. A different objective between main story mode and PVP mode have made us consider rebalancing many things out as some weapons may overpower and can easily be used to exploit the game difficulty. Not only weapon and ship parts, but also an enemy encounter where we considered doing more fine tune with them to let players in every level get to enjoy the game at their comfortable challenge level. From feedback we've received, many players have mentioned that the game is either too easy or too difficult. So we hope to sort these issues out to make the experience in Airship: Kingdoms Adrift goes great with all levels of players and offer a variety of play styles possibilities that players can enjoy our game as much as possible.
The rebalance of Manacoil Poacher by reducing their difficulty and change its fleet from 2 Corvettes to 1 Corvette and 1 Gunboat
Estimate release date
With all of the above in mind, Airship: Kingdoms Adrift team has decided to move the release of Early Access to be around Q2 of 2023 and the official release of the full version to be October 2023. Once we can determine the exact release date of the Early Access release, we will make sure to announce it to you as soon as possible.
Until then, we would like to thank everyone for your continued support and believe in our team to make Airship: Kingdoms Adrift possible. We hope our explanation and update on our plan will let you better understand our choice of delaying the early access release. We really appreciate you for taking this fantastic journey with us. We will always be around here, so please feel free to keep chatting and leave us any feedback and suggestions you may have.
Moreover, the first official AMA is already planned. Jay, the creator and director of Airship: Kingdoms Adrift, will host the AMA on 9th December 2022. Please stay tuned for further announcements about this!
Thank you so much for your tireless support!
Airship: Kingdoms Adrift team