Why Early Access?

“Early Access provides Hero's Song the best chance at becoming the game we want it to be. Getting early feedback from a vibrant community is vital to our dream.

Hero's Song is a single-player and multiplayer game, so the game must be balanced properly for both play styles. We need to improve the game to support up to 200 players, but our initial release will support up to 25. We want to ensure that we're careful with the features we add, and we want to have a roadmap in front of the community to give you insight into what we're working on.

In addition to the value we get as game makers, your support during Early Access helps us finish development on Hero's Song. Your support also allows us to be independent of large game publishers so we can do things the way we believe they should be done.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Six months. We do not believe in leaving Hero's Song in Early Access for a long time. Our goal is to finish the game and release a polished version within six months.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The full version will differ from the Early Access version in the following ways:

• Significantly more polished with gameplay and performance improvements.
  
  
• Full support for up to 200 players on a single server.
  
  
• Open-world housing: This will be the first thing we work on post-Early Access release.
  
  
• Mounts: Mounts will be added during Early Access.
  
  
• An additional 6 classes will bring the total to 21 classes.
  
  
• Boats: Boats will be a big part of the game, but will not be in on Day 1 of Early Access.
  
  
• Weather: We will be adding a weather system during Early Access.
  
  
• Racial Housing: Each subrace will have a distinct architectural style.

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What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The current state of the game is as follows:

• When you create a character, you can choose from 15 classes and 9 races, including three subraces of Elves, Dwarves, and Humans.
  
  
• All subraces use shared racial housing (i.e., Avar and Tenab Humans share the Human architectural style.) Our plan is to create a unique architectural style for each subrace.
  
  
• We can hold around 25 people on a server for Day 1 of Early Access.
  
  
• Difficulty: Hero's Song is a hard game and we haven't fuly implemented the UI, so you should expect a steeper learning curve for this version of the game.
  
  
• Bugs and other issues: You can expect to find bugs in the game during Early Access. It's part of why we need Early Access. We're a small company and we need your help, especially with multiplayer testing.
  
  
• Depth: While Hero's Song is a very deep game, we're going to be gradually adding a lot of depth to the game over the Early Access period. Our dream is a very stat-heavy game. As we add new features and things to the world, you can expect there to be a lot of things we need to both add and clean up.
  
  
• Gods: On Day 1 of Early Access, Gods will not take physical form, but this will be something we will add early on in Early Access. They are still the core of the game and their influence on world creation is huge. Our vision for the Gods are pretty epic: we want to give some of them their own planes of existence, and we want to have some of them appearing in the game world.
  
  
• Premium server listings: This will be added during Early Access.

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Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“We plan to increase the price once the Early Access period is over.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We plan on involving the community extensively during development through regular streaming of new features, and through extended Q&As with the development team on CohhCarnage's Twitch channel at http://www.twitch.tv/cohhcarnage.

In addition, we have both forums and a great Reddit community that we plan on actively being a part of and listening a lot to the feedback from our players!”