This is an exciting first announcement for us. After months of sleepless nights, were finally able to push the game to Early Access and I can share our plans for the game and our reasons for why were in Early Access. Monstrous originally started out as a 2D game. It was heavily influenced by Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight, which we hold dear to our hearts. We didnt want to make just a copy though, we tried to imagine how a game like Moonstone could be realized in a time where melee combat has taken to new heights by excellent games such as Souls series, Bloodborne and Dragons Dogma (a personal favorite for me). Moonstone was also a free-roaming game, so we made a board-game like setup but dropped the turn-based approach to modernize it even further. After a few early prototypes, it became clear that the concept was more suited to 3D so we switched to Unity Engine around late 2017. The prototypes immediately improved and after an initial phase of technology pre-production, we started production in January. We all knew that making a free-roaming action game in 3D would be a tremendous undertaking and we needed help developing it as we didnt have the resources to hire user-testing groups. We had two options at that point, either crowd-fund the game to increase our resources or release the game in Early access and get help from the player-base that would be interested in being involved in a development cycle. None of us felt comfortable with the idea of crowd-funding. We wanted to have an open structure where players would take part in the development, not just fund the project and hope that it will one day release to their expectations. While it is true that we could have setup the tools to involve the players ourselves, it meant additional time and resources spent on setting up and maintaining such a structure. Steam already offered such tools, Valve were and still are actively spending tremendous resources on demolishing the wall between developers and players. It takes little effort for us to communicate with players, push fixes and builds that can be downloaded from quality servers. So here we are, finally in Early Access. We are well aware that the game is nowhere near a release. Its not a highly polished game with only few bugs remaining to fix. Being a free-roaming game, it is not the kind of game where we can just push a couple of polished districts for players to explore and feed content over time either. The game currently has the core combat, general structure of the Rivals Mode and the districts implemented. We could have added more to the build, more assets, more enemies, more features. But we thought it was important to have a frame-rate that was at the very least over 30FPS. We omitted anything that wasnt optimized and would drag the frame-rate to sub-30FPS. We want to use Early Access as a platform where we can build a game with a dedicated community that is as excited about the concept as we are. We sincerely thank you for any support you can offer even if it is just showing the patience to read this announcement . Please feel free to join us on Discord and Discussions where we are actively keeping a presence. If you want to have more information about how were going to proceed from here onward, I will be making a post in the general sections of the discussions.