Let me start out with a thank you! As some of you know, I was against doing an Early Access, especially one this early. The game was just so buggy and so many people these days think “Early Access = polished release candidate”, which is NOT what Early Access was ever supposed to be. But nevertheless, here we are. Despite how buggy and janky Beta 1 was, you guys stuck with us and we appreciate it.
This week I want to share with you what to expect in Beta 2.
Let me give you the high level changes first:
Bug Fixes. Still buggy, but a lot closer to what modern “Early Access” is.
Dynasties. You can get married, have children, grandchildren. . . Basically another way to get champions and characters into the game.
Localization. The game is localized into German, Chinese, French, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Italian. It’s not on by default because we aren’t yet certain how good the localization is. It’s all Greek to me (Which isn’t in the game ironically). We are recruiting people into our MVP program who speak any of these languages natively because we do want to turn these on by default ASAP.
Steam Workshop Support. Not only can you make mods you can also just download them and share them.
Gameplay Additions. To get War of Magic out, we had to pull a ton of characters and content from the game to fit in 32bit. It was heart breaking. None of that made it back into Fallen Enchantress or Sorcerer King either, but now it’s back. You will notice quickly a bunch of new types of monsters, monster lairs, quests, etc. Feel free to cry with us that all this amazing stuff had to be taken out before.
AI Improvements. I won’t call the AI smart yet, but it should play substantially better than before.
Balance. I won’t say things are super well balanced yet, but they are night and day compared to Beta 1.
Progression. There’s now a Dungeon Master AI that looks over the world and gradually places new lairs and other things as time passes. It should make each game feel even more unique. Eventually, we want to use this to put in chained narrative quests.
Let’s take a quick look!
Modding
Players will be able to create and share the following:
Maps
Goodie huts
Quests
Tiles
Items
Factions
Units
Spells
Particle Effects
Recipes
Monster Lairs
Lots of other stuff
We also include tools you can use. For example, the tool below lets you create Tiles which are referred to by Quests and Goodie huts.
The map editor lets you place starting locations, quests, goodie huts,
You can deform the land however you want.
We’ll be taking feedback on how to make these tools easier to use and add new functionality. But if you want to make Mordor, than sure. You want to make your ultimate fantasy RPG game, go ahead. Make it and share with others.
I’ll be making dev journals and uploading new tools to make doing this easier, because I’ll be right there with you.
Localization
I barely speak English. So I can’t tell you if this is written in correct Germanese or not…
For that reason, we’re not going to have the game come up in a localized language by default until you guys give us the “coast is clear” sign. To change the language, click on this:
Here’s Japanese:
Here’s Chinese:
Once we get an idea of whether this is acceptable or not then we can officially say the game supports these languages.
Not only did the original game not support non-English, it didn’t even support non ASCII characters. This was a big effort.
Dynasties
We’ve enhanced the Dynasty system that was in the original War of Magic. Now, your fame makes various suitors available for you to choose from. Until you have some fame, no one wants to marry you. As your fame grows, the higher the quality of characters you will have access to.
Female characters will give birth to children. How often you have children depends on how much time you spend with your spouse in a city. But your children can grow up and you can have marriages arranged for them, they will have children, and so on. You can spend 1 essence on a child to imbue them (you start with 10 essence) in order to bring them onto the map as a character in the world you can use.
These characters inherit the traits of their parents, even how they look visually…and this is a game with non-human characters that can be bred with humans. DON’T JUDGE ME!!!!!!
“She has her mother’s eyes…”
Better
Beyond the obvious, what we hope players will notice is just how much better the game plays. More stable. Less buggy. Faster. Less memory use. More balanced. Smarter.
You will also probably notice more of the original art has been restored.
This has involved digging up old spinny hard drives from a very long time ago to find Photoshop v5 files and re-exporting. I know not everyone loves the art style in the game, but few games before, or since, have as much handcrafted fantasy art in it.
While this is a strategy game, once players start using the tools, I suspect there will be more than one RPG style campaign made.
Confronting a werebard in her hideout.
Visually, we continue to improve the graphics bit by bit. It’s subtle in some places.
Spread the word
As you know, this started out as a pure labor of love for us, working on it in our spare time. Thanks to your wishlists and Early Access purchases, we’ve been able to have people work on it full time. We’d love to expand the team so if you like what we’re doing, spread the word! There is so much that can be done here. We can’t wait to see what you guys do with Beta 2.
Beta 2 is scheduled to go out on December 16, 2025. Stay tuned!