Dear Couriers,
It’s time for another dev diary, and today we want to give you a bit more insight into what we’ll spend the next few months doing. As you’ve probably heard by now, we’ve decided to delay our Early Access release from November 4th, 2025 to March 3rd, 2026, so today let us give you more detail on where that extra work time is going.
The priorities we set ourselves are about adding new features as well as polishing what’s already there! A lot of the work we’ll be doing might well be invisible to players, since it’s the kinds of thing that leave a negative impression when done badly, but don’t necessarily stand out as a positive when working well.
And you might see new additions that we haven’t talked about yet on top of the below.
Guidance and Controls
Camera and Controls are and remain huge topics for us: From the very start of this game’s development in early 2023, we knew we wanted to nail down “CCC” (that’s Camera, Controls and Character) as soon as possible… and then we ended up revisiting it across several playtests anyway! This is a crucial and complex part of the game, and it therefore has required quite a bit of iteration, and it still does. We want the controls to be easy to pickup without adding unnecessary friction, but also offer the kind of depth and variety that horse game fans love, like extending and collecting your gaits. We’re trying to span the width of preferences people have for controls by giving you a lot of options to customize your game experience.
We’re incorporating a lot of feedback we’ve had from our players from the Demo these past few weeks to improve horse controls and camera. For example, we are adding framing options so you can adjust the camera’s offset and distance from the character, and we’ll give players the option for the horse to stop automatically upon dismounting.
This also means that if you first play the game and you don’t like the controls, please try out different settings! We’re counting on our community to help each other out here as well - though we’re doing our best to provide guidance, experienced players helping new players find the best settings for their preferences can be a wonderful advantage of having such an active community!
Performance and Optimization
The Legend of Khiimori is a detail-rich game, which makes it quite demanding to run. This is why we’re revisiting our presets for Low and Medium quality in order to improve what the game looks like even on less powerful hardware.
In addition, we are adding notifications and adjusted error messages that will better inform the user about issues impacting their performance. For example, the game will let you know if your hardware is below minimum specs, if your drivers are outdated, or if you have installed the game on your HDD instead of your SSD. We see value in this because — as already covered in our last dev diary — the Demo and the discussion around it has shown us that we are reaching a lot of players for whom those things might not be all that familiar yet, so we do our best to help these people be able to play.
We’ve also added support for all major upscalers (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) and will support frame generation which further should boost performance and to a certain degree also image quality, and further work has gone into reducing hitches when playing the game.
Here too, we realize that players’ preferences vary a lot, so we are adding more settings for graphic features that are subject to personal taste, such as motion blur. In all of these aspects, from visuals to controls, please try out different settings if you’re not happy with the looks or with how some things work and behave.
The diverse landscape of Mongolia
World and Design
We’re further fleshing out the depth and strategy around route planning: Parts of the map are becoming more challenging to traverse, which means more decisions to make about whether you dare to tackle difficult terrain that demands skillful riding or choose longer but gentler routes to you want to take your time and reduce the risk of injury to your horse.
We’re also updating the resource gathering while riding, inspired by the spectacular real-world ‘Tenge Ilu’ sport in which riders from the steppes hang from their saddles to snatch coins and other items from the ground at high speed. We can only recommend watching some video of it, it’s SO cool.
Also on our to do list for the immediate future: upgrading Yam Network outposts to add useful features such as hay, water and cooking fires, additional crafting recipes and improved balancing for existing ones, and extra mission types for variety and challenge in your life as a courier.
In short: We have a LOT to do! We’re doing our best to juggle urgent player feedback from the demo along our own vision and priorities and we once again thank everyone for your patience as this amazing game project has grown far beyond our initial plans and expectations.
Winter is coming (work in progress)
Top 200 Wishlists!
We have another nice little bit of exciting news: The Legend of Khiimori is now in the 200 most wishlisted games on Steam!
This number doesn’t come with any benefit, but it is a very clear sign that people want to play this game, and that the audience for a horse riding focused open world game with some crafting and gathering, survival mechanics and delivery missions is quite significant. Thank you all for being here, and for being patient with us 💖
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
#15 | Breeding in our Demo, Performance Considerations & More
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