The time has come to part ways with Early Access.
As a longtime player myself, I understand why Early Access often causes frustration and distrust. But in the case of The Succession of Changing Kings, it ultimately benefited the game:
Acts II, III, and IV have now been completed. In the end, the game features more than the promised 80 deaths and over 800 events and quests.
The Succession of Changing Kings now has two wonderful original voice-overs: one in Russian by narrator Sergey Mayskiy and one in English by Wolenard. And the songs he performs, just listen to them!
The save system, which had caused frustration for many players, has been redesigned.
The game now includes three difficulty levels, and a lot of work has been done to balance the gameplay.
Across the four acts, the game contains about 4.5 million characters of text. Of course, there were plenty of typos... My tiny publishing house, consisting of myself alone, worked without a proofreader, but many attentive kings stepped in to help, and I believe we managed to clean everything up together.
The visual side of the game was also reworked. As many correctly noticed, the map was created in Inkarnate, while the quest illustrations were generated with neural networks. I started working with them back in the days when characters could end up with six fingers and a tank might be peeking through a doorway. Now the visual style is finally close to what I originally wanted it to be.
I am not a professional developer. This is my first project and, Tenebris and all its shadows, I am proud of the final result. Thank you to everyone who supported the game, gave advice, and offered constructive criticism. If there are developers among those reading this, they will confirm that one of the greatest pleasures is receiving feedback from players.
When I see that someone has spent 30, 50, 70, or even 100+ hours in my game, it is simply… incredible.
The game has a fantastic (for me) 88% rating, and almost all negative reviews are related to the fact that I used AI to create the quest illustrations. I have never hidden this, and it has always been openly declared.
The game leaves Early Access at 14:00 New York time and 19:00 Central European Time. Welcome to the throne of Valendor. Try not to die too often… actually, no - die!