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Beta Launch date pushed back

We’re sad to inform you that we have had to delay the beta launch. Hopefully you won’t be too disappointed and that you understand that most indie games are done in spare time and therefore delays are inevitable.

This itself is by no means justification, and while we had every intention of making the original deadline of the 2nd June, it has been obvious for a little while now that we are not going to be ready. The team had a meeting with regards to where we are with the game and have decided that we are not willing to compromise the quality nor integrity of the gaming experience just to meet a particular deadline.

As Scott (one of the GMs) said, “you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Heck, look how long it took Blizzard to just release Diablo 3!”.

The design and development is simply very time-consuming and we have slipped up on a number of fronts which I won’t go into detail right now. I think over the coming weeks we’ll try to communicate our development roadmap a little clearer and give you guys some feedback on how we are tracking.

The newly revised launch date is now 9th Feb 2013!! Seems like a long way off, but we feel this is now much more achievable. We might even be early Our forecast shows that we should be ready towards the latter part of this year (4 to 5 months time), but felt the launch immediately before or after Christmas would have less of an impact.

…And now some good news

If you want a sneak preview of the Character Creation (the official signup process) you can do so by going to: http://alpha.ilkor.com

Although the Character Creation process is now developed, there are a few known aspects that are still not complete:

1. Character Portraits (hand drawn illustrations by Simon that appear in the centre of the dail)
2. Character Avatars (again, we are waiting on Simon. Currently we only have ‘some’ of the facial parts for male and female humans & male dwarves)
3. Content / Copy for items like Settlements & Feats.

Please go and check it out and give it a good test, supplying us with plenty of feedback. Undoubtedly there are small snags and fine tuning to be addressed. Performance might be a little slow as we are hosting alpha on a ‘development’ server.

You are welcome to go through the ‘Character Creation’ process as many times as you want. You character won’t be saved, remember this is just for testing purposes only.

And Finally…A Knowledge Quest

In the coming days we’ll also be announcing the first ‘Knowledge Quest’ that you will be invited to take part in. You’ll learn more about this in a separate announcement to this.