Hello Champions!
What a great weekend with the Guerrilla Collective showcase, with the announcement of the Early Access release date for Alaloth – Champions of The Four Kingdoms! We had a few super crazy days to match the deadlines and be sure that everything was perfect for such an amazing moment for the whole team but, hey: June 30, 2022 is the day and we can’t wait to open the gates of Plamen to players from all around the world, being finally able to explore the huge world we’ve built. We took a short break on Sunday, checking confs and chilling but there are just few days left before the big one, so it’s time to speed-up things a bit and enter pre-release mood.
First of all, we want to thank all the people joining us, asking things, wishlisting the game [numbers are booming, lot of love for you all] and we want to give you an overview of what is going to happen before the launch. Being a small team, there are just two people taking care of community and PR-related topics, while dealing with the day by day activities of the studio, so forgive us for being a bit slow in answering. To make things easier, we invite you once again to join our official Discord server where we are going to set-up ad hoc channels to gather feeds about the EA, report bugs and to propose ideas and features to be put in-game. There will be topics on our board here on Steam too, but what we are trying to do is just to simplify the flow for both the team and the community. We are almost 24/7 on Discord and we can answer questions in real time there and this will be crucial especially after the launch, with people playing the game. We’ll do our best to be fast on both sides but still, give us a few time to organize the work properly [hiring!].
Considering the huge amount of questions we’ve received, we are going to run a new AMA session on Discord next Monday, June 20 9AM PST/6PM CEST. Please check this post here to know more about this and send us your questions as suggested, to help the team answering topic by topic, the proper way.
Anyway, the most important thing now is giving a bit of context about the Early Access choice we’ve made, as we’ve anticipated on Saturday. We announced EA back on May 30, with a gameplay trailer following the long silence with almost no updates in months. We consider the end of April as a fresh restart for the project, but it has always been intended as a restart more on the marketing and PR side than on the development side. The development never stopped, even if we had to face many issues on the way.
Just a random shot to keep the dwarven mood we choose with the cover image...
Taking back publishing rights for Alaloth, we had to sit down and put all the pieces together, biz-wise. Just to make things simple to understand for everyone: we had two scenarios to choose from, at time. Scenario 1: rush a bit to finish the game, release it, give the game to one of the many publishers willing to jump in and bring it on consoles, and move on with a bunch of money in our bank account. Scenario 2: continue investing our money in development to fulfill the original vision we had for the game. To be even clearer: we would have been in the position of attending the Guerrilla Collective going for a full release Q3/Fall, and nothing would have changed for players. Money for us, consoles ports to be done by someone else, no pressure and easy life after ages of stress that costed us a lot, even in terms of health. But when we looked each other in the eyes, the questions were:
why should we put ourselves in that position, losing control once again on things that we are able to handle in what we truly think is the best way for the success of the game?
why taking 3 or 4 months to finish something that is already completely different in terms of scope from what we’ve planned at the very beginning, that grew and evolved ?
what about taking all the necessary time to iterate with our community, gather feeds and raise the bar, instead?
A few people was rightfully asking why we’ve decided to go Early Access after such a long time…well, let us be clear and 100% direct once again: this is not an Early Access made to grab money and try to fill our pockets with an all-in move.
This is not an Early Access where you are going to find T-pose chars, game breaking bugs or missing features. The game we had in mind at the very beginning, is already in, fully playable, but lacking polishing and balancing. Point is: this is not the same game anymore, this is something bigger we would like to finish in an even better way, putting in all the stuff we had to sacrifice during the dev journey, when the plan was completely different as the contexts in which we were working.
...and one more to show the in-game camera in the same area, Khunde-Hohn, the dwarven capital!
This is why we decided to go Early Access, planning tons of cool stuff we are going to detail in the next days with a dev roadmap, including all the things we are working on now, that are coming later this summer and beyond. This is also why we decided to go out with a very low price that is not going to change with the full release [with a 20% discount at launch], despite the huge number of contents on the way. Of course, we are talking about something to be finished yet [dealing with balancing, loots, vendor stocks and such right now] but as we just said, you can expect all the features originally intended working since June 30. Just consider what is wrote in the store page for what is in and what is going to be put in the near future. We are very sorry of not providing loc and full [English] dubbing from the start for example, but again, plans were different and we'll do our best to put in as much contents as possible to make Alaloth an unforgettable experience. Hopefully with your help. These are the fundations of a huge fantasy universe we are willing to expand as much as possible, with your support too. Expect full transparency from us, no secrets, full access to on-going stuff. This is what we always had in mind and this is what we can finally do.
If you have questions about the topic, post it in the comments or poke us on Discord!
Stay tuned!
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Check out our Steam page
https://store.steampowered.com/app/919360/Alaloth_Champions_of_The_Four_Kingdoms/