Dear Couriers, we hope you’ve been having an excellent time with the Demo during Next Fest and beyond! (And if not, remember to send us your feedback on Discord and your bug reports using the F1 key!)
As you’ve probably seen, we’ve decided to keep our Demo live for a while longer, so even if you’ve missed Next Fest or have been too busy with the myriad of other cool upcoming titles, you can still return to The Legend of Khiimori in the coming days.
Demo Success
We’re very pleased and proud to say that the Demo is performed excellently in terms of player numbers! Over 54,000 people played our Demo during Next Fest, which was enough to get TLOK onto Steam’s “Most Played” list for the event. The festival also gave us a noticeable boost in Wishlists, enough to catapult us well over the 200,000 Wishlist threshold. This is absolutely remarkable and wonderful, especially in light of the fact that only a few years ago, some people on our team were repeatedly told that the audience for horse-focused games was just too small and too niche to invest in their development. Well, the audience isn’t looking so small now!
For all the celebration, we’re of course also aware that the Demo has showed some of our players the various issues that our game still has, from technical reliability to performance, to player guidance to other design issues. Hence, our decision to delay the game by a few months to March 2026, more on that here. Thank you all for being so understanding about that announcement! We know many of you would love to get the finished game right now, but we’re very relieved that our community mostly seems on board with giving the game a bit more time in the oven to improve on those aforementioned issues.
Demo Insight: Please Adjust Your Graphics Settings!
We’ve had one very interesting insight thanks to our in-game analytics: it turns out about 70% of players who tried the Demo are playing on hardware below the minimum requirements. We see the need for further optimization here, and will put further work into trying to make the game as accessible as possible to folks without the latest gaming rig.
But even more interestingly, we noticed that many of our players have their graphics set to “High” or “Ultra”. What this tells us is that there is a significant overlap here of players who play on very high settings despite not having the minimum hardware capacity. We can only speculate as to why this is the case, but we see in our community that our game is reaching a lot of passionate players who don’t otherwise play many games on PC and therefore might simply not be aware of the options. Therefore, please note that if your game is stuttering or lagging, please head to the Graphics Settings and Change your Quality Preset to Low or Medium.
Under the “Show Advanced” tab, you can then tweak individual aspects of the quality settings to experiment with what matters to you and what makes a noticeable difference on your computer. If you’ve been experiencing lag, we recommend starting with the lowest preset and then trying to gradually increase different effects in order to find out what works for you.
Note that we still very much want to make improvements on our end and are considering solutions for better presets and explanations. But for now, while the demo stays available, please try if you can improve your experience by trying different settings!
And as an aside, we think it’s actually really cool that our game is apparently reaching people who might not even play many PC games otherwise. We love that The Legend of Khiimori is broadening those horizons!
Demo Tips: Try Breeding Horses!
We know that the Demo’s time limit isn’t making it easy for people to play around with more long-term features such as Breeding. Fortunately though, you can replay the Demo as often as you like, and Steam Community User Gooseberry has put together a very helpful guide on how to to reach the breeding mechanics in a short amount of time.
As for why you should give it a try: we know we don’t have to explain this to the hardcore horse fans out there, who have already enjoyed our horse color genetics info dumping, but if you’re new in the horse game space, let’s put this into more widely accessible terms:
Breeding horses in The Legend of Khiimori is a little bit like your skill tree in an RPG. You invest gameplay time into training your horses (i.e. “levelling up”) and then instead of investing experience directly into skills, you breed those horses to get new foals with higher maximum stats and different traits.
This isn’t a linear process where one horse is always better than the other either: you might get one horse specialized in cold resistance for a trip to the mountains, and need another horse that’s particularly fast for a time-sensitive mission. In the demo, we give players a cold-resistant horse early on in order to let you see more of the gameplay and world quickly, but in the final game breeding for those specialized skillsets will require an effort of gathering, crafting, (eventually!) taming wild horses and combining your most valuable bloodlines for even more talented foals!
Think of the horses in your stable as you would the weapons in your arsenal or the cars in your garage in other games. Not every horse is suited for every job, so you want to build up a diverse lineup over time in order to weather any challenge your courier duties confront you with.
And of course, the foals are just so dang cute!
Have you tried breeding horses in the demo yet? We’d love to hear from you! As always, make sure to use the ingame bug reporter by pressing F1, or come join our Discord to let us know your detailed feedback and wishes for the game.
Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:
#13 | EA Release Date, Gameplay Trailer & Gamescom Highlights
#14 | News about Game’s Title, Languages & Alpha Playtest Survey
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