Well it seems that my suspicions were right all along. In a recent article on steam in regards to Medieval Engineer’s development, Keen Software House’s CEO, Marek Rosa stated that the game will be leaving early access and that the game will no longer be worked on.

As someone who purchased the game a while back, it saddens me to see this happen. Working on two early access games simultaneously is no easy task and part of me believed that Medieval Engineers would never get released, though once Space Engineers was fully released and continued being worked on, I had a slither of hope that Medieval Engineers would get the same treatment so I bought the game only to find out that my suspicions were right from the start, it didn’t get released.

So what do we have so far in Medieval Engineers you ask? Well you can build castles I guess and survival mode exists which is pretty bare bones and feels pointless. Honestly, just by looking at this game right now it really feels like an afterthought, something that could have done well had it been an expansion to Space Engineers but as a standalone experience it is pretty empty to say the least. Now I’ve experienced the early alpha stage of Space Engineers back when passage blocks were ladders and blocks didn’t have functions and watched it grow into something amazing. Medieval Engineers is basically what Space Engineers would have been if it was released in alpha at the time when Survival was barely added.

I should point out to you all that this is not the first time Keen Software House have abandoned a game part way through development, Miner Wars 2081 was also abandoned and they instead decided to work on a new game, Space Engineers. Space Engineers on the other hand was an ambitious project that managed to get a lot of attention and ended up becoming an award winning indie title that managed to get released in an acceptable state.

So why give up so soon on Medieval Engineers? Space Engineers went through a very long, arduous Early Access period. I experienced it at its very worst and I can safely say that the game really pissed me off sometimes due to the developers poor prioritization of updates. Why on earth would you release an update that makes auto firing rocket launchers and gatling guns functional before releasing factions? Well we as the players would end up being the ones to suffer as a result of their stupidity, seeing all of our hard work get blown to bits by working rocket launchers and gatling guns that would attack any object in its vicinity regardless of what it is because pretty much everything is hostile due to the lack of a factions system allowing players to take ownership of blocks so that blocks of the same ownership are not treated as hostile to other blocks that the player owns.

Despite all the hardships and the struggles, the developers eventually pulled through thanks to the community’s feedback and their hard work, so why can’t they do the same with Medieval Engineers? That is a good question. Now one could argue that they considered Space Engineers to be a financial loss due to the project being over funded but that’s the risk all developers take when they go into early access. Space Engineers was not going to be easy to make, they should have known this but they went in anyway. Announcing Medieval Engineers was a bold move but after the release of Space Engineers, it didn’t seem impossible from our perspective but considering the fact that Marek Rosa has yet to confirm any reasoning for abandoning the project besides saying “For us, Medieval Engineers is a complete project” tells me that the whole thing was just a scam from the start and he knew it.

It is pretty obvious that Medieval Engineers is not a finished game as unlike Space Engineers which had a detailed roadmap that constantly walked through the process through the alpha and the Beta, leading up to its release, Medieval Engineers’ development ended out of nowhere. We all knew that the game was nearing its release because we were told that it was getting there. They informed us and the updates were frequent and full of content. The later half of Space Engineers’ development couldn’t have been better and was the highlight of the whole Early Access experience. Medieval Engineers had none of that, the game was only in its early alpha stages of development and never reached the beta stage. Therefore Marek Rosa’s claim that “Medieval Engineers is a complete project” was a big fat lie.

So should you trust Keen Software House in future projects or is this the last straw? We know that Keen Software House have had a history of releasing unfinished games and I personally believe that the company can not be forgiven for this. Space Engineers was their chance to us that they were capable of releasing a game and while they succeeded, their failure to release Medieval Engineers in an acceptable state is shameful and I sincerely hope that the company gets the comeuppance for this stupid decision that will further stain the company’s reputation.

It is always sad to see a promising indie developer that I have supported over the years to end up this way. Keen Software House delivered to me my most played Steam game, having clocked over 1000 hours into Space Engineers and while I spent many of those hours getting frustrated by the game’s troubled development, I cannot deny the fact that the game allowed me to build such great things such as this massive space city and this boxy space ship.

I truly feel bad for all the people who invested so much time and effort into Medieval Engineers in the same way I did with Space Engineers because I understand the connection that comes from our creations as well as the craving to create things. Creativity is in my blood, it is what I live for, that and giving you guys a lot of shit to read because at the end of the day, productivity is important in life, the agency to create anything in any game is always amazing. I just wish the developers of these games weren’t so unbelievably stupid so that we can experience better creative sandboxes instead of half finished games that get abandoned because the developer stops giving a shit or fails to properly budget their development, forcing them to abandon games.

Keen Software House have stated that they are currently working on porting Space Engineers to Xbox and that they are continuing to work on the PC version of Space Engineers, just not Medieval Engineers sadly.