Hello everyone!
As a team, we have been working hard on Battalion updates for the last 9 months. With every update, we’ve listened to the community’s wishes and opinions - and factored them into the adjustments we’ve made to the game. For us at Bulkhead Interactive, a key aspect of our development philosophy is to empower the community as evidenced in every changelog.
We’d like to take this opportunity to say ‘thank you’ for being a part of our Early Access phase. We agreed pre-launch that we would be treating Early Access exactly as it was intended - a time for testing the game, and getting meaningful feedback from the players, and we’re humbled with the response we’ve received over the past six months. We really didn’t anticipate having such a big launch, and it’s now well documented that the high player numbers caused us some problems. But thanks for sticking with us, because now we’re able to announce...
...That in early 2019 we are officially ending our Early Access phase and preparing for full release!
To that end, there will be no more public game updates until full release, but this is by no means just a case of tying up loose ends. The Battalion 1944 release in early 2019 will deliver the game’s biggest update to date, with an overhauled user experience, more content than has ever been added before, brand new goals to aim for and so much more. Thanks to all the testing and feedback, we’re confident that the game has really now found its identity. We can’t wait to share it with all of you, but for now, it’s a secret!
This overhaul requires work - but more importantly, a healthy playerbase to enjoy the new game. It's important for Battalion 1944 to make a big splash at full release, and recapture the hearts and minds of players who fell in love with the concept earlier this year - as well as finding new players who were reluctant to join the fight back then because of the tech issues around the Early Access launch.
For this reason we’re committing to putting all future updates that were scheduled to go live pre-launch into one big release, rather than drip feeding that content as it's being worked on, as each release requires a substantial amount of development resources to be redirected to testing and pushing a build live. We would rather direct that dev time toward new features & systems. We’ll be talking more at the start of 2019 as we ramp up our marketing, and prepare for our own D-Day!
This does not mean that we’ll be completely cut off from you guys, as perhaps we have been when we’ve previously ‘gone dark’ in the past. We will be running small tests closer to release with our dedicated Discord community to gauge reactions and feedback. We will also release more information on our official Discord closer to the time.
But the combination of polish and highly-requested features will be a game-changer for fans. The game that we release at full launch in 2019 was ONLY made possible by using Early Access to get that vital feedback from players. We’re giving Battalion 1944 what we all want from the game: the best chance it can have to succeed. We hope you’ll support us in this journey going forwards through to full release, as we’ll be preparing our Mosin-Nagants ready for action on the servers next year...
Investment from Square Enix
On another topic, you may have read on games industry news sites that the publisher we’ve worked with (on The Turing Test and Battalion 1944) - Square Enix - has recently purchased a share of the Bulkhead Interactive business. This investment is something that we have been looking forward to announcing and we’re really glad that we can reveal it now!
Just to talk a little bit about what that means - for Battalion it’s a really a positive step. It means a better opportunity at launch, more marketing and more focus from the team at Square Enix too.
Alongside the investment news, it was also announced that we will be working on a new IP for Square Enix. To be clear, this has no impact on the work going into Battalion 1944, and the studio will continue to be focused on working towards the game’s release (and continued post-launch support too).
A separate, small 3 man team within Bulkhead is currently in the pre-production and planning phases for this other title that we will eventually work on; this is standard industry practice, but we wanted our community to know what’s happening at our studio, and ensure that no wires were crossed.
So that’s it - it’s been super busy in the past few months, and will be for the foreseeable future - so wish us luck, and thanks again for all your support and feedback.
We’ll see you in the New Year!
The Bulkhead Interactive Team