Recap: One week of Early Access

Battle Brothers launched into Early Access just about a week ago and so far it has been quite a ride!

First of all, a big thank you to all who have supported us by buying the game, giving feedback and suggestions, and reporting bugs! Please keep it up and keep spreading the word and help us getting people to know about Battle Brothers!

It’s now possible to upgrade your game to the Supporter Edition directly on Steam if you’ve enjoyed yourself playing the game and want to further support the development of Battle Brothers.

During the past week we were busy mainly with answering questions and fixing the most urgent of bugs. Nevertheless, we managed to squeeze in some smaller balancing changes and quality-of-life improvements based on your requests. Now that the dust of the launch is slowly settling we’ll soon change our focus again on adding new features to the game.

What’s next on the list?

We’ll soon start working on our first new feature: The event system.

While traveling the world a lot of unforeseen things can happen and surprise you. These events can occur anytime and anyplace and will force you to make tough decisions outside combat. Just to give you random example of what might be; if there is a Battle Brother with a criminal background in your mercenary company, a passing guard patrol might recognize that character and demand you hand him over as a prisoner or face the consequences. Similarly, individual characters in your group might interact depending on their backgrounds and traits – will the adventurous noble get along with the lazy sluggard beggar?

Events like this will not be entirely random but depend on what happens in the world and which characters are in your company. Their outcomes will be partially randomized for the sake of replayability. The possibilities for creating interesting, challenging and morally ambiguous events are limitless.

The event system is also much more than just the events themselves. It lays the foundation for a dialogue system that allows the player to interact with all parties on the worldmap like caravans or patrols. This will open up a lot of opportunities to create interesting encounters and make the player feel a lot more like a part of the world. Depending on how the event system works out, the whole contract system may also see a complete overhaul in the future to make for something more engaging than the current wall of text.

At this point it’s difficult to estimate how long it will take to get the event system into the game so we won’t give an ETA here. Make sure to follow our developer’s blog to always get the latest updates and we will tell you about our weekly progress.