Hey everyone! Wherever you are in the world, we hope you had as many sunny days as we had here! Unless you’ve been playing Kona the whole time, of course! Today, let’s not beat about the bush: we are going to push back the game release once more and spend the next months finishing, porting and marketing Kona. Plus, our Early Access build will, from now on and until launch, only receive stability updates. It took us several attempts to word this message correctly, wishing for our post to be as transparent as possible for our loyal fans, just as we wish for your honesty. The following paragraphs will go through explaining our vision of Early Access and how that positively affected the game’s quality, but somewhat negatively on our release plan.

Time to Move Past Beta

Early Access is a great place to gather and address feedback from the community, which is really cool to improve a game. At some point though, we just need to wrap up the experience, which means going through the whole development, QA and localization process – this takes time. We want all our early supporters to experience the game in its true, bug-free form. For Kona we wish for us and for you to receive what you paid for, meaning to release a game that has gone through the proper quality assurance procedures. We want all our early supporters to experience the game in its true, bug-free form. In the next few months, we will be in “finish, fix and port” mode. This “mode” is unfortunately incompatible with Early Access’ “deploy, listen and improve” loop. We hope that you understand this, even if it means waiting a bit longer to get your hands on Kona. Trust us, we don’t want our title to be one of those “forever in Early access” games. We truly are looking forward to releasing it, but rushing its launch on the market after nearly three years of hard work will not serve any purpose. In other words: from now on and until the official launch, we will keep sending updates for stability and bug fixes, but we won’t add new content anymore. It’s time to focus on finishing the game.

"Q1 2017" Is All We Can Tell for Now

Right now we can’t tell what the exact release date will be nor can we confirm all the platforms we will support at launch. For now, we can tell that it’s no later than Q1 2017, though watch this spot for news to be published soon!

Changes to Expect in the Final Experience

Without spoiling anything, here’s a quick list of the elements we’ll be working on as we move toward the game’s release:

• Improved graphic design signature: we hired a graphic designer of 9+ years of experience in video game branding. While Kona will keep its identity, you can expect it to be much cleaner, from the boot screen to the ending credits, in the final game
• No more placeholders: some menus, voices and animations may feel a bit stiff from time to time. They will be polished in the next few months
• New beginning: from the moment you start the game, the experience will be different. We had to remove some elements from the beginning part of the game in order to avoid spoilers for the final release. We will now put them in there, and we encourage all players to revisit the whole game once it comes out
• Improved voice overs (English): we scheduled three additional recording sessions in order to fix some spoken lines that users felt annoying or out of place
• Larger map: the part of the map that is accessible in Early Access is about less than half the size of the full game environment
• More languages: in addition to French and English, we will add German, Spanish and Italian subtitles for game launch, with Russian following soon after, if not at the same time
• The snowmobile: yup, we kept it for the final release. Trust us, it’s awesome
• Community space: that is still part of the plan, so you can expect some details in the next few weeks
• And dozens of other surprises: obviously, we won’t list everything here as we’re trying to keep this article somewhat short.

Busy, But Still Here!

We will still be reading and answering all of your feedback, even if our news posts will be mainly around stability updates until the final release. The most important to us is our community and we love talking to you all! Also, as soon as we can tell you more about all of this, we will! That’s it for the wall of text! Thank you so much for understanding and don’t hesitate to leave us comments if there’s anything! Cheers! Parabole Team

[ 2016-09-06 17:35:24 CET ] [ Original post ]