Early Access Roadmap - v2.0

We just celebrated our first year of Early Access on The Anacrusis, and we've made a ton of great progress. We've fixed a bazillion bugs, added hundreds of quality of life features, changed our minds about a lot of questionable features (we're very sorry about launching with friendly fire on) and added tons of new content and features, including peer-to-peer servers, Holdout Mode, Steam Workshop mod support, Steam achievements, tons of new weapons, weekly challenges, and the beta launch of Episode 4.

We've crossed a lot of work off of our Early Access To-Do list, is what we're saying. We still have three big ticket items left before we feel ready to leave Early Access: Completing Episodes 4 and 5 and adding a L4D-style Versus Mode to the game. Here's the state of each of them.

Episode 4

We're finishing up Episode 4 this month, which will move it out of Beta and into full release. Update 32, which will land later this week, includes a significant art and balance pass on the first two levels of Episode 4. There's still more work to be done here, but we're pleased with how these first two levels look and play. We'd love feedback. The final steps before we can tie a bow on Episode 4 will be to do a similar art + gameplay pass on the finale, then optimize the content in those levels for perf. We expect that to be done in the next month or two.

Episode 5

Once Episode 4 is complete, our art team will be free to focus on Episode 5. We're planning on making significant changes to the blocked out versions of the map, based on feedback from players on the first four episodes. We expect to continue working on Episode 5 until we leave early access later this fall.

Versus Mode

We've done a bunch of the back-end work required to make Versus mode a reality and we'll have some really exciting news on that in the not-too-distant-future. We have a few major technical hurdles remaining, so we're still in the "doing the work so we can do the work" phase of implementing this, but the end of that work is in sight. We expect to have timing and news about the path to full Versus mode by summer 2023.