Hey everyone!
It’s Friday, and we have good news for your guys! For starters, a new update will go live in a few minutes. On top of adding text support for German, Spanish and Italian, the new build also contains hundreds of layers of enhancements as well as support for Steam Achievements.
Before moving further into the details of the update, we have something equally exciting to announce: Kona is finally coming to Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox One and PS4 simultaneously in March of this year, thanks to our new and awesome partnership with Ravenscourt!
“But you said no update until launch, you liar!”.
True.
IMPORTANT: PLEASE NOTE THAT YOUR OLD SAVEGAME WON'T WORK WITH THE NEW UDPATE, as explained down below.
We had long talks about whether or not we should update the game on Steam and GOG, but many factors helped us make our decision.
Firstly, even if we did our best to avoid it, your existing save data won’t work in the final game. This is due to the large number of changes we made to Kona since the last update. However, any savegame you create in the new update will work on launch and afterwards. To us, this was the main reason to update. The last thing we want if for you to be penalized for having supported us early on.
Secondly, as we mentioned before, some story-related elements were stripped out of the game in order to keep some surprises for the final version. This was great six months ago, but with Kona’s launch just around the corner, we feel like you should be playing something closer to the actual thing, hence the need for an updated build.
Thirdly, on the business side of thing, the game base price will be USD $20 after launch. At some point we have to get closer to that price, but we can’t if we do not provide anything in exchange. With this update, Kona pricing will increase now from USD $10 to USD $18 (of course, if you own it already, you won’t have to pay extra).
The bottom line is that we did not want past and new Early Accessors to be disadvantaged on game launch. We wanted our message to be clear and consistent across Steam, GOG, press releases and trailers.
With this update, the game world and play time will remain the same as before. It simply is a more polished first hour (or so) of gameplay that won’t be erased in March when Kona finally launches. Still, you’ll find many drastic improvements.
You will also notice that all voices (French and English) are now in the game and that texts, subtitles and menus have been localized in Italian, German and Spanish thanks to Ravenscourt (Russian language is still part of the plan and we will keep you in the loop as soon as we are ready to add it to the game).
Finally, you can now use F to equip your flashlight and M for the map (it works in the car now). The key remapping feature for keyboards will come in another update we will publish soon.
Published by Ravenscourt
Everywhere outside of Steam, GOG and Humble store, Kona will be published by Ravenscourt. That is on Xbox One, PS4 and other PC storefronts. With a team of 7, we can’t handle them all, but we still believe being close to our audience is really important nowadays in the industry. On that front, our partnership with Ravenscourt is simply perfect. We get to keep talking to you all while bringing the game to new crowds.
That’s all for now, but again, we want to thank you all for believing in our project and for your patience facing the many delays the game had in the past. The real thing is coming and it looks great! Try it for yourself and feel free to send us your comments, as always :)
Talk soon!
Everyone at Parabole