The following is a message from John Smedley, CEO at Pixelmage Games LLC.
Hello Everyone,
I wanted to give our backers an update on how things are shaping up and provide information about the status of both the game and delivering you all the things we promised you!
First, the game:
Hero's Song is shaping up nicely. We're currently in internal Alpha 2 and we intend to launch Alpha 3 on Thursday, October 27, or Friday, October 28, so it's just a few weeks away.
UPDATE: The Alpha 3 launch was moved to Monday, October 31.
What can you expect from Alpha 3?
- 15 of 21 classes will be live. They are still rough. I don't want anyone to think this is going to be a polished gameplay experience. It's going to have lots of bugs, and lots of balance issues. That's to be expected in Alpha.
- Multiplayer: Multiplayer will be in there, likely with up to 25-50 people. We won't be putting a cap on it, but we have a lot of work to do on our server to deliver the 200 people we've been talking about. We expect to increase that number over the course of Alpha 3 and Early Access on a constant basis.
- Dungeons: They are in, but they're basic. Just monsters to fight... no traps yet.
- Lots of monsters with a lot more coming: We have a great variety in there already, but we have a ton more coming in. We did get Dragons in there, so there are some very nasty things to die to.
- Underworld: Very basic right now. Essentially, we're going to be working on it in short order, but the Underworld needs a lot of love.
- Loot: In and working, but it's basic for Alpha 3 - What does this mean? Well as we're continuing to populate the world with interesting things this will get built out in a big way.
- Points of Interest: These are just coming in now. Lots of cool things to explore, but not a lot are in yet. That means the world will only get more interesting.
- NPC AI: This is in pretty good shape for Alpha 3, but we have a lot of work to do to make the AI use more interesting abilities as we create them for the enemies. A good example is the Goblins: they use nets to try and root people. We have a lot of NPCs, but need to work on making them do interesting things rather than just basic attacks. Also, the AI in towns will get a ton better over time as we give the NPCs things to actually do rather than wander. You'll see this improvement with every publish we do.
- Server Management Tools: For the opening of Alpha 3, these won't be ready or will be very basic, but this will come online within weeks. You'll still have the basic tools to launch the server, etc, but a lot of the fancier management stuff still is coming in.
- Steam Integration: We think you'll be happy with what we've done with our Steam integration. It's pretty well done and our goal for Alpha 3 is to allow you to easily join your friends right from Steam—and within the game, too, if you want, but only the "right from Steam" part will be in day 1 of Alpha 3.
- Gods: The gods are in from day 1 of Alpha 3, but they aren't going to appear physically in the game yet. They are vital in world creation and every element of the game, but we also intend to let you fight them. That won't be in until much later.
- Bugs: We have plenty for you to find.
- Performance: We're in pretty good shape on this, but there is still some hitching we're fighting and other stuff we want to improve on. Don't expect it to be perfectly silky smooth.
Early Access is still planned for early November. The exact date will be determined after we've had a few days of feedback from our Alpha 3 players.
In terms of delivering on the physical goods and other things promised in the campaign, we're working on all that now and intend to have it all delivered by the end of November. If you are worried because you didn't select a perk, please relax. We're going to make sure everyone gets what they thought they were going to get. We'll be handling this by reaching out individually to the people who didn't realize they needed to select a perk. Please don't be worried.
Last but not least, we're hiring a Community Manager to do a better job of updating you all!
Thanks for your patience and your support.
—Smed