Expeditions: Conquistador Post-funding Update #19, Release Date Moved

While it’s nice to hear that the folks at Logic Artists will have more time to polish up Expeditions: Conquistador, it’s a tad disappointing to see its release date slip up a bit due to unspecific distribution problems.

At the very least the $30-and-above backers of the Kickstarter campaign will get the chance to try a new pre-release build of the title, and the game is getting a German localization and a multiplayer mode:

The upshot is that we’ll have time to finish polishing the game, implementing the last little nice-to-have animations and helpful GUI details, and testing it more thoroughly to make sure there are as few bugs as possible upon release. Additionally, to mitigate the disappointment of the pushed release date, we’re going to release another build of the game for all Kickstarter backers who gave $30 or more. You can expect a link in your e-mail on Thursday when the game was supposed to come out.

That’s not the good news though. The good news is that we’re going to have multiplayer. A few of the previews that hit the Internet over the past couple of weeks mentioned it, but here’s the official word: Expeditions: Conquistador will feature a hotseat and TCP/IP skirmish mode where you and a friend can connect to each other and pitch your tactical cunning against each other. I assure you this is not the reason for the delay – the multiplayer is already implemented and working quite nicely.

If adding multiplayer seems a bit tacked-on to you, then… you’re correct. It was basically something we added for our own amusement, because the more we tested the combat in singleplayer, the more we wanted to play against each other. In particularly, I just had this powerful urge to see if I could beat our combat programmer Casper (I couldn’t – in fact he completely destroyed me). I’ll even admit that the multiplayer has in fact detracted a little bit from the singleplayer, in that Casper has had less time to polish the campaign because he had to work on the multiplayer, but now that we have a little extra time on the clock, we’ll be able to catch up on that.

We’ll also be able to localise the game into German, as we’ve long been hoping to do. I know we’ve flip-flopped a little on that question, as our financial situation changed along the way, but we finally sent all the text yesterday to be translated into German, a few days after our Spanish translation came back from Pink Noise (and word from Juan is that it’s very nicely translated, and they really hit the right tone for the game).