THQ Nordic Announces Fatekeeper Early Access Development Plan with Content Schedule and Launch Price Policy
The publisher THQ Nordic, together with development studio Paraglacial, released a new trailer yesterday to promote their soon to be released fantasy game, Fatekeeper, which has physics based, visceral swordplay, and strong environmental interaction influenced by old games such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic as well as the demanding difficulty of Dark Souls combat. The game is expected to launch in Early Access this June and give the developers time to tweak the game with player help.
Paraglacial is a very small, independent studio of only 13 people. As this is the first time for the studio to venture into a new IP, a totally new genre, they decided to use Early Access to reduce the risk on finances and production. The studio released an official message on the Fatekeeper steam product page about their approach toward the design with the players
Fatekeeper is an undertaking where many things are new for us we develop a completely new type of game and genre and also an original IP. Paraglacial is a small studio and so have 13 employees developing this game and we decided to release the game as an early access to limit our risks and to try building a more collaborative process with early testers for designing Fatekeeper.
The developers stressed they do not want players to serve as "free quality assurance workers," but that they intend to see what aspects of Fatekeeper appeal most to the community, and then use that feedback to inform the development direction.
In the first iteration of Fatekeeper, players will be able to explore just a small part of the story campaign which will give them a playtime of 2 hours instead of the overall planned 15 hours. The studio Paraglacial intends to push content and game patches out regularly over the course of the testing period. They expect to release the full game after 18 months.
To compensate the early access buyers for their involvement, Paraglacial also confirmed a steep launch discount for the game for the first month, with the price being somewhat low with its start, yet rising gradually after each important content update.
