From our earliest stages of testing, involving the community has been key to our plans. Early Access was the natural next step, and we are grateful to have more folks join us on this journey. Our first day was a whirlwhind and many of you have been asking: where do we go from here?
In this developer blog, we'll share what you can expect in our Early Access build, how we'll be moving forward, and what we're already developing improvements for. Let's get into it!
At the launch of Early Access, the entire of the first chapter of the first Act of the game's first story arc is fully playable. This includes around two hours of gameplay complete with cinematic cut-scenes. During Early access we intend to have updates that make other chapters of the first Act available to you.
This area of game development is more resource heavy and time consuming to produce. It is an important part of why we want to run a good, stable early access. We plan to continue developing this content while getting feedback on both our content and approach. The team is currently polishing the Second Chapter of Act 1, preparing it for a future update in Early Access.
The game is designed as a social multiplayer experience. In addition to Riding Clubs, there are a series of weekly repeatable tasks and side quests (that will expand as we continue through the EA period) as well as a Weekly Goal system that rewards you for completing content over the course of a week.
There are ten races available around the island. Search out the race boards scattered around the map to find them. Each race has a leaderboard; check your best times and see if you can reach the top!
You can also do all of these races as a group. If the group leader starts a race, all members of the group will get an invitation so that you can race with each other to see who wins!
There are collectable items available around the island. These won't be immediately useful as the systems to put them to use will start to appear with Chapter 2, but you can start collecting them now!
You can also access the first of our new riding locations that we call Scenic Rides. You can visit the pier in downtown to access this new system. These maps are designed to provide alternate riding locations for casual exploration and stunning spots that provide a picturesque location to enjoy a trail ride. We intend to continue to add new locations like this as we proceed.
You can expect two different types of updates as we move forward: smaller fixes and larger content drops.
We will alternate between doing regular small bug fixes / QoL updates, with larger content drops coming every few months. What do we mean by content drops? Expect things like new quests, new races, new scenic ride locations, and a few other surprising systems we aren't quite ready to talk about just yet.
With that in mind, we also need to say that we don't have a specific length planned for Early Access. How long we stay in Early Access will depend on the progress of the game.
This is an Early Access period. There will be bugs! While we always try to ensure our release versions are as stable as possible, it will be likely that you will encounter issues - especially at this early stage. We have specific sections in Discord for you to report issues and an in-game tool to quickly submit reports.
This is an important element to Early Access for a studio of our size (a little over 20 folks!) Players will find issues faster and in more volume than we could ever hope to find with the QA we can do ourselves. Having more players allows us to find issues, get more information, fix them, and make the experience more polished and enjoyable with each update we do!
We really want to deliver something that feels intuitive to play and looks good. While we will never be a 100% accurate horse simulation, we are striving to provide a high quality experience in this regard. So you'll see a constant flow of animation improvements for both horse and rider. The first Early Access version already has the start of these animation improvements for the riding experience. You'll see new mounting and dismounting animations. This is just the start of the animation polish that is in motion, we expect this to be an ongoing process as we continue to polish the riding gameplay experience. This was something we heard loud and clear during the previous playtests, so know that it's an area we're focusing on.
We are a social game with a multiplayer world, so it is important for us that players have ways to express themselves. We intend to add a regular stream of new emotes and social interactions into the game. This is an area that we are currently working on and expect that this work will continue throughout the early access period.
We're ecstatic to welcome all of you to this important stage of our development. It's been a wonderful community so far, and we hope to see that continue as we grow. There is still a long road ahead of us with lots of content to add and things to polish. This is just the beginning and we're excited to partner with the community to create the best game possible and build a game that becomes a home away from home for many years to come.
