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Might And Delight of Shelter series fame were planning to launch their tiny MMORPG Book Of Travels in early access at the end of August. Unfortunately, they ran into some gnarly bugs during their beta and had to delay launch without picking a new date. They’ve still not firmly announced one, but M&D have explained just what’s holding up Book Of Travels and reassured folks that the team is actually pretty close to squashing the worst issues. Launch is “not as far off as some of you have been speculating,” they say.
If you’d not been keeping up with Book Of Travels, I invite you to click that link up there on its name which is mostly just me explaining why I think it looks neat five times over. In short though, it’s a laid back online game with rare player interactions and communication through symbols. The trouble with online games, tiny or not, is that they sure do come with extra bugs and issues to iron out. In a new post, M&D explain that their recent beta revealed three such issues that they just couldn’t justify launching with, even in early access.
“These particular bugs were too prevalent and too detrimental to the general play experience for us to just roll with it, despite the fact that Early Access titles aren’t expected to work flawlessly right out of the gate,” M&D explain of their three big problems.
One of the biggies was a bad case of rubberbanding—that phenomenon in an online game where you’re walking along minding your own business only for the game to snap you back to where you were standing several seconds before. It’s annoying once, but downright infuriating if it’s incessant. The second major problem was NPCs and events spawning in incorrect places—including enemies in tea houses, which also sounds annoying. Last up was NPCs occasionally being invisible to the player. Especially bad if they’re an enemy in a tea house, yeah?
Luckily, M&D say that they’re quite close to tackling all three of those problems. They’ve picked a new release date internally, though they still aren’t ready to share it just yet, and say it’s not as far off as some folks think. I’m not sure what speculation other folks have been making, but that feels like a promising sentiment in any case.
While we wait, M&D were doing that video series explaining various parts of the game. They kicked off last month by explaining how co-op works. They posted the last of the series today, explaining why they chose early access. They explain that the western part of the game map will be available in early access and limited time “chapters” they’re planning, which sound like online game seasons with their own stories and whatnot.
Book Of Travels is now expected to launch in early access, well, soon-ish-ish? You can find it over on Steam in the meantime.