World Beyond Gods will be released through Early Access. This post explains what that means, in plain words: how the game grows, what it costs, where you will play it and what the first slice holds.
The alpha is the game
We are not building the whole game behind closed doors and releasing it in one go. The alpha is the game itself. It goes online with its first slice, and from then on it grows, slice by slice, until the endgame is in.
There is no separate test build. What you play in Early Access is World Beyond Gods.
A new slice every two to four weeks
Each update adds a slice of the game, and each slice is a step towards the endgame. We will not put dates on slices far ahead. We will announce each one as it nears, here on the dev-log.
After the two starting valleys, the slices still to come include the two capitals, dungeons and raids behind doors in the world, the Seam and the shared lands of the north, and the living world’s systems as they land. Last comes the Rift-wound, where the endgame lives. The full plan is on the roadmap page.
Free until the endgame
Early Access is free to play until the endgame is in. Once it is, World Beyond Gods moves to a monthly subscription. We will announce the price before the subscription begins.
Where you will play
You can get World Beyond Gods two ways: with our own launcher, downloaded from this site, or on Steam. The game runs on Windows PC. The full system requirements will be announced, and so will the date Early Access opens.
The first slice: two starting valleys
The first slice opens both starting valleys at once, one for each people, and the two never share a start. The Tidecrowned begin in Saltglass Reach, in the town of Shellmoor, whose tide streets run down three coral terraces to a lagoon; their first Rift hangs over the kelp forest on the flats, and its boss is the Tidemaw.
The Hornbound begin in Emberfold, a warm bowl on a plateau terrace under a low amber sun that has not moved since the gods left. You wake in the Hearth-Mother’s hall in Hearthrib, a town of ribbed bone halls round a hearth court. Outside, Rift-dried husks of the valley’s dead are clawing at the town’s north-east gate. From there the quest chain takes you across the valley: through ridged grass where sparks of the Rift set the meadow smouldering, up to the Antler Ring on the north shoulder, and round the rims to wake three wind horns that fell silent the day the Rift opened.
It ends in the Cinder Basin, a shallow bowl of ember scree north-east of the town, where the valley’s Rift hangs under the Girdle. Fight there and it angers. The sky darkens round it, its creatures fall into the basin, and the Pyre-Antlered comes down: a tall antlered creature with a ribcage of violet fire and antlers burning at the tips. Close the Rift and the held hour returns to the valley, and the brass rings on the town’s spire chime.
That is the core loop of World Beyond Gods, and it is online from the start.
The launch mail
If you want to know the day Early Access opens, sign up for the launch mail on this site. It works like this:
- One mail when Early Access opens. That is all, unless you ask for more.
- Major news, only if you tick the box.
- Confirm first. We send a mail to check the address is yours before we add it.
- Leave in one click. Every mail has an unsubscribe link at the foot.
We keep your address in our database and use it for nothing else. When Early Access opens, that one mail is how you will hear.
