Hello Dragon Hunters!
We are delighted to reveal that Dragonkin: The Banished is coming out in Early Access March 6th, 2025 on Steam!
Check out the Early Access trailer below and come back tomorrow when we’ll be revealing a new developer diary with a look at more gameplay for Dragonkin: The Banished.
So, why Early Access, you ask?
At Eko Software, we’re a small but passionate team of around 30 people working on Dragonkin: The Banished. We’re crazy about the ARPG genre, particularly Hack & Slash games. We’ve been making them for around 12 years now!
For Dragonkin: The Banished, we wanted to push the boundaries of what we’ve done before. We moved development to Unreal Engine 5, allowing us more flexibility compared to our previous engine. One of our goals is to highlight the things we love about the genre while bringing in something fresh and new to delight fans.
For the launch of Early Access on March 6th, we have prepared content to introduce you to the world of Dragonkin. You can play through the prologue and 1st act as one of 3 classes, collect gear, and expand your skills using the Ancestral Grid. You’ll have access to a couple of end game modes and be able to start levelling up your city. We think it’s a good starting point, but there’s more to come.
We’ll be bolstering this content throughout until launch with what’s planned on our roadmap. Expect regular updates including the addition of online multiplayer and more character skills, biomes, the addition of the 4th character and more endgame content. It also has room for us to make adjustments and tweaks to address player feedback and concerns. We’ll publish more information on the roadmap prior to launch, so keep an eye out for that.
Within the ARPG genre, we believe there is ample room for innovation and one of our major goals involves the Ancestral Grid which we’re going to deep-dive in a future Dev Blog. But the general idea incorporates randomly generated fragments that are collected as you play, ensuring that by the end of the journey, your grid will be completely unique. We wanted to add an element of fun while making your grid, while giving theory-crafters the flexibility to adapt their grids and come up with new playstyles.
Early Access is a collaborative process. We know how passionate the ARPG community is, and want to get as much feedback from our players as possible. We’ll be using this to shape and improve the game as we move towards the 1.0 launch. Early Access also gives us the opportunity to invest further into the project, possibly altering or expanding the scope of our plans for Dragonkin: The Banished.
We have many goals for development, but being in Early Access gives us the opportunity to bring the community into the process and we strongly believe that it will result in a better version of the game for everyone.
How to support us?
Share the trailer, spread the word, and wishlisting Dragonkin: The Banished on Steam helps us a lot!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1863430/Dragonkin_The_Banished/
What's next?
We’ve got a lot to share in the coming weeks, starting with a Developer Diary tomorrow (January 10th), where we’ll discuss some of the systems and gameplay in Dragonkin: The Banished.
In the meantime, don’t hesitate to join us on social media and Discord if you haven’t yet, for the latest news, discussions, and exclusive sneak peeks. Know that your enthusiasm and support mean the world to us, and we’re so grateful to have you on this journey.
Happy New Year from the team at Eko Software, and get ready for our next DevBlog!
