FROM THE BLOG

State of the beta

Hey this is MM, I haven’t posted in a while but I really want to explain a few things. We mentioned we entered private beta about 2 months ago and the testing is still going. I still keep saying its gonna be public “soon” because the game really has all content in place most of the time. So it is a matter of us being satisfied with a build to call it “done” and give it out to all of you that bought the game.

However, it’s not so easy. During these 2 months the game design has been changed a LOT. Things you see on the videos I made a few weeks ago, a lot of that stuff has been either removed or changed to something better. This is because we are CONSTANTLY playtesting with our dedicated team of testers. We implement features, tweak stuff, release a build, play and repeat that over and over. This is very frequent now, at least once a day a new build is pushed to them. So, the things that don’t work in playtesting are put on an anvil and me and Geti smash them with a large hammer. 

We could release before it is ready if we wanted to, but we don’t. We are extremely dedicated to making this game as good as possible. This is gonna be the best multiplayer experience ever made.

A note to you if you bought the game. The things you see on the buy page or buy poster, some of them are irrelevant now. Not because we didn’t make them or can’t make them, but because we did make them and they turned out to be crap while testing. Nobody wants that.

For example:
The workshops you see in classic KAG didn’t really work as we wanted them to work. So there were builds without any workshops, you had a trading post like you see on the videos, but it felt a little too spammy, like a convenience store where you could buy anything without upgrading at all. In recent builds we replaced workshops with factories that produce items. This turns out to be the best idea we had and I hope they will stay.

Farming as you see on the video I made (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwufFZ8zvgE) was fun the first few times you played it, but right now none of the testers wants to farm – it tends to be too boring. So we are replacing it with a more straightforward way of farming which doesn’t require tedious tasks. We’re keeping all the fun elements like destroying the enemies crops to prevent them from having food and make them spawn longer.

A bolt-throwing machine that you see on the buy page has wheels and can be driven by 2 players. So its much cooler in reality than on the page.

The ram is something you’d expect from a medieval game, but in reality using the ram in a tile based map was very tricky. We wanted it to require a lengthy run, so that you actually rammed it into a door or wall. But its too hard to have a straight runway in KAG. Having the ram work by just clicking at the wall is boring and something you might find in EA games not my games. We won’t do that, so we just removed the ram. In place we introduced a hand held drill that heats up, steams, and hurts enemies, which is much more fun. We just need to make it more balanced cause it is quite overpowered 🙂

The canopy was never introduced because we are in the opinion that standing with a canopy to protect your team mates is the most boring thing in the world. We want the game to be dynamic and focus more on attacking than defending. We just made the boats give ample protection from incoming arrows, and rely on builders to construct more permanent cover during a siege.

There are more examples where this has happened during testing, but the core thing to understand is that if something is missing, it’s missing because it wasn’t as fun as we needed it to be, so we put something better there instead.

We can’t wait to share the beta with you guys, so you can see for yourselves how much the game has been expanded and refined.

MM

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