Hey Everyone,
It`s time to reveal more about upcoming Update 17, and to share our plans for continuing updating MKW in 2019 and 2020.
As September sale showed there`s still plenty of interest in MKW, and we are happy to continue updating the game for the rest of this year and into the next year. Over the next few months our focus will be on improving graphics, performance and combat with a lot of work planned on our in-house game engine. Same time we will be expanding the world map gameplay with additional features. World Map and combat AI will also see a lot of improvements.
However we do have to adjust our plans when it comes to adding major planned features - like CoOp campaign and World Map expansion. Our biggest regret is not working on these two massive updates earlier in the development, as now player population to support CoOp campaign is simply not there. CoOp campaign was always planned not really as a CoOp, but more of an MMO experience similar to the original Kingdom Wars, and this formula just doesn`t work with less than 50 players online at once. And with regard to the world map expansions - it`s clear that majority of MKW players would rather see improvements in other areas of the game - from AI and more campaign features to performance and graphics.
With that said - hope is not lost - as it would make sense to have these large futures in a sequel to MKW. We don`t have the details yet, but hope to have an announcement on this later on this year.
Update 17 Preview
With our 15th and 16th updates we started to improve appearance of the game world, as seen through the ground view camera. Our major goal with the next update is to complete this major upgrade - with more flexibility in the camera angle, better graphics in the ground view and fixes to the performance and camera scrolling.
Another major area of focus is improving the look of combat up-close - that involves characters actually fighting each other and not just swinging the swords.
And of-course - performance. There will be some minor sacrifices to the scale and graphics to improve performance, and a lot of optimization - but the end result will be worth it.
Finally - we also continue to expand campaign gameplay - up next - letting players issues commands to AI during battle - like attack here, defend this location e.t.c
Stars End
As some of you might know, we have another project going into Early Access now - Stars End, and while the team working on it is separate from MKW team - there will be a bit of a delay before we can release out 17th update - looking for early November.
To preempt possible complaints about working on another game - Stars End is designed by separate two developers, using completely different engine and completely independent from the two developers working on MKW. But since Stars End is launching soon, it would take all of our team couple of extra weeks to help out there with launch - thus the delay.
We hope that you can see Stars End Early Access launch from our point of view - the sales from Stars End will help us put more work into the Kingdom Wars games, perhaps even help to expand the MKW development team.
Thanks again for your support, and looking forward to bringing your Update 17 in a few weeks.