Early Access v.3 Coming to Steam April 4th!
After months of incredible work from our dev team, we’ll be releasing Early Access v.3 on Steam on April 4th, 2019. This update is our largest and most significant update to date by a massive margin. We have finally rounded out the remainder of our core gameplay and now we can set our sights on content, cosmetics, polish and getting the game ready for Full 1.0 release hopefully by early 2020.
Free Weekend and Special Promotion Details
Hanako: Honor & Blade will be free on Steam from April 4th – April 7th to try out! If you want to buy the game, from April 4th – April 18th the game will be only $3 on Steam to celebrate Early Access v.3
Hanako: Honor & Blade on Steam
Patch Features/What’s New
New Tutorial
We made a new tutorial from scratch after introducing so many new mechanics since Early Access v.1 & v.2 to help new players find their way around the battlefield.
New Attack Animations
We wanted to address community feedback regarding fluidity of attacks, so we re-worked our melee classes’ heavy stance attacks to allow for more fluid motion but also more weight/impact.
Co-op Vs. AI Mode
Building a player base in an online indie game is a massive challenge. So we added a Co-op vs. AI mode and map allowing for 1-4 players to enjoy destroying AI across 4 different difficulties. We’ll be adding support to our existing maps as quickly as possible.
Skill Trees (Per-Match Leveling)
We’ve wanted skill trees for years in the game, and they’re finally here! Choose between Active Skills, Movement Skills & Stat Skills to customize your play style per-match. (Similar to MOBA’s). This system introduces Movement Skills (called Talents in game) like double-tap dodges/dive rolls and double jump.
Rivals & In-Match Player Dueling
To make the online experience more engaging, we’ve added Rivals and In-Match Player Dueling. Rivals allows a player that’s killed you repeatedly to be tagged and grant bonuses for avenging your own deaths. Player dueling allows you to challenge an opposing player to a protected duel to the death that other players cannot interfere with.
Other Patch Features
- All New Menus
- Player Statistics & Leaderboards
- Steam Friends/Party System
- Steam Achievements
- Basic Server Queuing/Matching
- Re-designed Capture the Scroll Maps (Yari Foothills and Shiga Forest)
- Dozens of Bug Fixes/Quality of Life Improvements
What’s Next (Early Access v.4 Plans)
We’re so proud of this release we plan to really take time to nurture it and fix bugs that come up in the early days after release. We will then turn our sights towards our FFA/Battle Royale mode called Shogun Showdown. We’re going to prototype this mode quickly during our Play w/ the Dev Test Nights (Every Wednesday @ 10pm EST) with 24 players and see how it grows. We’ll also begin work on our Early Access v.4 release which is one of two final Early Access patches before we transition to a Fully Released Game!
Track our progress on our full Development Roadmap
Rough plans for EAv.4 (Subject to Change)
- Release Shogun Showdown ASAP
- Start full animation polish across the game
- Finish one of the last 2 campaign maps (Yamai Village)
- Improved audio/foley throughout the game
- Add more co-op vs. AI maps (to be released upon completion, not wait for big patch).
- Focus on major bugs and drill down to smaller bugs we’ve lived with for a while.
Thank You
Myself and the entire Hanako: Honor & Blade Dev Team would like to thank you for your support for the past 5 years, or longer. What we’ve been able to pull off with basically no budget is completely amazing and we hope that the game has finally reached a point that we can grow and sustain a playerbase with all of these new additions. We welcome you to join us for chats/feedback/events on our Official Discord any time!
Important Game Links
- Hanako Twitter (@playhanako)
- Hanako Facebook
- Hanako Discord
- Hanako Twitch
-Matt
