Hey all!
As promised last week, some very cool news for you here. We’ve got the Early Access release date. If all goes according to plan we’ll be releasing Northgard for you to play on the 22nd of February 2017. So in a little less than a month! So what’s the plan? And more importantly what will you be getting your hands on for the early access?
The version that we’re releasing into early access is what we consider to be the core of the game. You’ll have the free play mode against the AI, with several victory conditions, the impact of winter, three different clans and all the Norse mythological creatures you can possibly want to fight or befriend. We’re happy with the balance of the game that we’ll be showing you but we’re counting on your help to take it from good to “oh my”.
Once the core game is out there will still be more to come. The features that we’ll be adding to the game over the next few months include, but aren’t limited to:
- Multiplayer mode.
- A story based campaign mode.
- Two new clans and the buildings and features that come with them.
- Changes to the diplomacy system.
- More victory conditions.
- More neutral factions (creatures you can convince to join your cause).
- Tweaks and upgrades to the combat system (if you think we need them).
- Extra language support (much later in the EA).
- Extra platform support (Mac/Linux) again, closer to leaving EA.
This is what we consider to be the minimum of features that we’ll add to the game. We’ve already made solid progress on a lot of these, but we’d prefer to get your feedback on the core game before we throw more energy at features that all rely on having a solid experience right from the start.
Of course all of this will be spaced out over the next few months, we’d like to see a full release by mid year, but you know how it is with early access, we’re going to be taking into account your feedback and that will heavily influence the development time.
In any case we’ll be communicating regularly on the progress of the game here and via Twitter and such. So you’ll have plenty of patch logs, updates and new information. Not to mention that we’ll be pushing any critical bug-fixes as fast as we can find and fix them.
So stay tuned for more information and please, don’t hesitate to ask questions in the comments or start a discussion thread!
The Shiro team.