Spiritual successor War for the Overworld from Subterranean Games released not too long ago, despite needing more time in Early Access to iron out bugs and, well, actually finish the game for a v1.0 release.
However the ”wheels were well and truly in motion” and they couldn’t slam the brakes on ”without serious financial harm.” The team acknowledge the sorry state of affairs, adding they’re ”truly disappointed in ourselves”.
Already the 15-man development team - who had never released a video game before - had run into a number of financial troubles but had managed to pull things together.
”Early Access had been an extremely useful program for us both in terms of feedback, QA and financial support, but the funds coming in were not enough to sustain us indefinitely and our finances had become extremely tight, so we put together a plan and budget for the remainder of development to ensure we’d be able to see ourselves through to launch.”
They borrowed money where they could and some staff even voluntarily worked for free, but they kept quiet to avoid ”a self-fulfilling prophecy” that everything would fall apart.
”…it’s unlikely we would have been able to survive until another opportune window for release appeared. Something that would have cost us the game in it’s entirely,” they admit.
”There are of course a few other less devastating reasons. Primarily that we were so focussed on the upcoming release on the game that by the time we realise we needed an extra few weeks we were already far too close to realistically delay.”
”Physical boxes were in production, various commitments, both internal and external had been made and the budget left over for marketing had already been spent. The wheels were well and truly in motion and it was now impossible to put the breaker on without serious financial harm.”
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What about the significant number of bugs plaguing the game at launch?
”Many bugs that have been discovered since launch were ones that we weren’t aware of, or they were introduced in the very last few days of pre-release development before we had a proper chance to catch them.”
”The difference between having a couple of dozen users playing on a daily basis to literally thousands was extremely profound, we were swamped with issues that we hadn’t even come across or ones that affected systems with specs we hadn’t been able to properly test. It was an extremely eye-opening experience for us.”
Over 20 patches have been released for the dungeon God game, and the team is working on ”implementing the features that had been missing from the game, things like tooltips and lobbies which had no right being missing, we expect that those will be implemented within a week or two.” Free content updates are on their to-do list.
”We’d like to reassure you all that we are 100% committed and dedicated to War for the Overworld. It’s a game that we truly believed had to be made and though we have certainly slipped up from time to time, this has been a labour of love from start to finish and we’re keen to continue dedicating ourselves to WFTO’s future.”
Check out the full ‘State of the Game’ update from Subterranean Games. For now it’s best to pass on War for the Overworld if you’ve been thinking about it. It remains an Early Access title despite be given a ‘1.0’ release. You could always re-play Dungeon Keeper…
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