If you’ve been following the Corepunk’s development over the last few years, you surely know that the team is running behind where it expected to be at this point. This is not perhaps altogether surprising news, considering the game’s history. The good news, according to the game’s latest dev blog, is that studio Artificial Core doesn’t think its development delays will affect the date for the game’s early access, which still begins on November 26th.
“Regarding unfinished work, we delayed the release of the new Steppes biome, which will now launch tomorrow, October 30,” the team says. “Overall, we’re roughly a month and a half behind schedule due to the significant volume of tasks, but don’t worry—this won’t affect the start of early access.”
“As mentioned earlier, we’re about a month to a month and a half behind our initial content and feature plans for early access. The technical aspects and polishing of the initial game are priorities for the launch. A slight delay in the extraction instance, heroes, and other game modes won’t hurt us, but surprises in the technical area might. Given the complexity and volume of tasks—such as smooth transitions between servers and shards, disconnects (hello 403 errors), and spontaneous server crashes—we were forced about a month and a half ago to shift a significant part of our focus. This led to a slight slowdown in releasing content and features.”
What it will affect is what content actually launches with early access. “This means that all the content we planned is largely ready but postponed,” the team says. “After launch, we’ll immediately return to it, refine it, and upload it to the PTR server for testing and polishing. After fixes, we’ll deploy it to live servers.
“On November 26, we’ll launch into early access. All the content we planned but didn’t have time for at the start will be released sequentially over 1-2 months after launch. From a product launch standpoint, this is even better for the game. Most players in early access will be trying the game for the first time, and with the new side quests, Episode 3, and the new Steppes location, we anticipate that by November 26, the game will offer at least 300 hours of quality content—not counting the huge potential for replayability. In terms of content readiness for early access, we’re absolutely confident that this is more than enough to begin our journey into the open ocean. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be adding content and features while simultaneously conducting extensive polishing of everything possible.”
The Steppe biome should be available for testing today, with further content updates planned ahead of the full early access push. If you’re eager to see the full roadmap ahead, check out the full letter. And if you’re curious about how development is gone and why we’re worried about the game, you can read our recent MMO Hype Train column.