Dear Friends of The Guild,

Next week, on September 17th, our Game The Guild 1 Remake: Europa 1410 will enter Early Access. Just in time for our release, we also reached another milestone of over 300,000 outstanding wishlists! A big thank you to all members of our community and fans of The Guild; your continuous support and feedback on our demo is driving us forward.

Roadmap

What is playable now

At the start of Early Access, you can choose one of 8 different professions to open your business and found a dynasty in one of 6 different cities. Employ workers in your workshop and have them produce goods you can sell at the marketplace, or send them to provide services to your fellow citizens.

Start courting, marry, and produce heirs to secure your legacy. A campaign in Europa 1410 can span over multiple generations, so the character you end a campaign with will probably not be the one you started out with.

Business and family are two of the three main pillars of Europa 1410. The third is politics and society: apply for offices and climb the social ladder by befriending, blackmailing or bribing fellow citizens in important places. Climb high enough, and you’ll even get a say in the city’s construction projects - expand the city with new walls, improve its infrastructure and enact laws that make sure you always come out on top.

In addition to these core gameplay features, The Guild 1 Remake: Europa 1410 offers many more ways to interact with the game world and achieve your goals. Which path you want to take through your journey is always up to you.

The professions that are already included in the game at the start of Early Access are:

• Smith

• Tailor

• Joiner

• Stonemason

• Priest

• Innkeeper

• Alchemist

• Perfumer

While all of these professions will be fully playable from the beginning, they will receive improvements and additional features added to them throughout the Early Access period, both based on your future feedback and things that are already in development.

You probably noticed that almost all of these professions are crafting professions, as we focused on crafting and economy for the start of Early Access. Additional professions will be added once their support mechanics are available: Robbers, Thieves and Guards will join the list together with the combat update, while the Moneylender and the Trader will be added once our work on Economy is done.

The 6 cities you can start your journey in are:

• Kuttenberg

• Graz

• Nuremberg

• Wrocław

• Freiburg

• Landsfort Herle (our tutorial city)

All of these cities have different properties and will provide you with different challenges, depending on your choice of profession.

The Early Access version also introduces a first iteration of automation: You can now assign a family member as master to one of your businesses and have it manage production tasks while you reap all the profits. You need to, however, make sure that your family member has joined the guild of your profession first.

Please note that this feature is still a very early version. Expect your masters to interfere with your plans by using funds or carts that you might’ve needed for other things.

A lot of feedback we got on our demo was about the lack of visualized interactions with the world and its inhabitants. We are now moving many actions from menus into buildings and special scenes, where you can interact with objects and characters to trigger the same actions. At the start of Early Access, only a small number of these interactive scenes will be available, but we’re steadily adding more to the list until the 1.0 release of the game.

Economy at the start of Early Access will already be more realistic and challenging than what you saw so far in the demo. AI dynasties will also act more intelligently and choose their actions according to their goals, but AI and economy are both in active development – you can expect these aspects of the game to expand as development progresses. If you want to know more about our plans for economy, take a look at our dev diary about Economy and Events.

At the launch of Early Access, you will be able to choose between English and German localization, and more languages will be added during the Early Access period. Currently, we can confirm text localization French, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Russian and Simplified Chinese.

You will encounter many more features that are not fully implemented yet and will be fleshed out until the game’s final release. Most of these work-in-progress features are marked with a symbol to make you aware that we are still working on their final form.

Regular updates

We will provide updates for the game on a regular basis throughout Early Access. These updates will provide better stability, bug fixes and balancing, but also add and expand on existing features. We want to give three of these updates some special attention, as they will not only add new content, but change how you can play the game. The last of these three updates will announce the game’s proper release into 1.0. You can read more about these special updates below.

The Stabby Update: Knives and Swords

This update will focus on combat professions and combat in general. It will introduce the Thief and Robber as well as the Guard. You’ll be able to equip your men to patrol the streets, break into other citizens’ houses and workplaces, or waylay carts on the city’s outskirts.

Combat itself – including duels - will also be vastly improved with this update, to provide a more fun and exciting experience for you. Duels especially will get a major overhaul - we can’t wait to tell you more!

Also planned for this update are more customization options for your dynasty and renaming your children and buildings, which will not be fully available at the start of Early Access – although the Early Access version will let you choose from a variety of different backstories to give your gameplay experience some unique aspects.

Additional languages are also planned for this update, but we can’t promise just yet to include all of the planned languages. Adding new localization options is a big task for us, as we want to make sure that translations work well in every language – this is not possible when translating the game 1:1 from English. If your preferred language from our list of confirmed languages is not among those added with this update, please don’t fret, it will be added soon after. Festina lente – as printers have known for five hundred years.

The Backstabby Update: Multiplayer

With this update, we will bring one of the most requested features to the game: Multiplayer. Compete against up to 11 other players, or play together to achieve your goals. To further enrich the competitive part of the game, we will introduce rivalries and alliances with other dynasties, together with cooperative and competitive challenges and victory conditions.

Also part of this update is a big update to the game’s economy. In addition to what we mentioned in our dev diary about Economy and Events, we want to make the city’s needs a big part of this update: Provide the city properly and see it prosper, or withhold certain goods if it helps further your agenda.

Last but not least, this update will introduce a new city! And you can help us decide which one to add by casting your vote in our upcoming city poll.

1.0 Release

At the 1.0 release of the game, we will introduce the Moneylender and the Trader, allowing you to get the most out of the new additions to economy in the previous update. As a Trader, you will get your hands on rare and sought-after goods, import them to help your city – and your purse – or export them to faraway lands. The money you make abroad will need to be exchanged for local currency; the Moneylender will help you with that – for a fee, naturally. And if you want to jump-start your game, you can, of course, take a loan; just make sure to repay it in time.

The release of the game will also include a brand-new map and additional gameplay with your Guild – rise above your competitors and control the future of your craft in your city.

Also part of the release will be improvements to crimes and punishment, which will bring new ways of gathering evidence, new opportunities to commit crimes, and many more ways to get punished for it! Together with improvements to family interactions, this will round out the gameplay experience. We will soon talk in more detail about all of these plans in dedicated dev diaries.

Another city is also part of the release of the game, and like the one before, we will ask you for your help with choosing it.

What else?

As stated earlier, we will improve the game constantly in regular updates in-between those bigger ones. Are you still missing something important on our list? Let us know on our Discord server or on the Steam forums!