Dear swordsmiths,
while you’ve been patiently waiting for news from the forge, we’ve been hard at work on a number of exciting Bladesong things. A lot of what you’re about to read is in progress, but it’s time we speak about it, so let’s dive in!
While the exact date drifts in the mists of prophecy, we’re excited to confirm that Bladesong will be released into Early Access in 2025! Until then, we’re planning to have at least one more public playtest and launch a proper demo ahead of the Early Access release.
Q: What will the playtest/demo/EA include?
A: Our two core pillars are the story-driven Campaign Mode and the sandbox Creative Mode. We’ll let you know details closer to each date.
Q: Can I preorder Bladesong?
A: Thank you for asking! You support us devs a lot by wishlisting the game on Steam now, and then even more by buying it on release date. The bigger the splash on that day, the more visibility Bladesong will get.
Q: What have you been working on since the last playtest?
A: Glad you asked! Let’s dive in ⚔️
Campaign Mode
Next to Creative Mode (which we’d consider decently battle-tested by now), the latest playtest in December 2024 showed a first, early version of the Campaign Mode – and your feedback helped us see that some of our ideas simply didn’t work in practice. Being practical people, we went right back to our literal drawing board and rethought Campaign Mode from the ground up.
Our most important goal was to make Campaign Mode more approachable and to allow for more exploration and creative tinkering.
Commissions are the gameplay heart of Campaign Mode – customers coming with physical and stylistic requests for swords that you are tasked with fulfilling. Our new approach gives you the freedom to explore and try things out on your sword before committing to your actions. To make your blacksmithing journey more interesting, we have added resources such as steel, leather and wood that you can obtain from various vendors, and more special things that you’ll find as you progress through the story.
The trusty Scrap Peddler and his stock.
We have also heard your feedback that gameplay felt a bit disconnected from the narrative, so we have worked on tying these two layers together. For example, customers now come with their own personalities and stories that are complemented by the swords you make for them.
In the early days of development, we focused on getting the swordmaking tech down in Creative Mode, making sure you get the tools you need to create the swords you want to create. For Campaign Mode, we have now made swordmaking more immersive: hammer away and deform the steel blow by blow! The tech under the hood is still exactly the same, so you keep all the precision and freedom you had before, and in Creative Mode, you will always be able to choose the previous editor-like controls if you want to take things fast.
Last but not least, we have worked on the way we analyze and rate swords. In Bladesong, your sword will get points in impact, swiftness, agility, and a few more categories – faithful to real-world sword physics, but also distilled and well-explained, so you don’t need to whip out your Mechanical Engineering textbook while playing.
Tracking the sword’s point velocity of the best Oberhau I could pull off. This one came out at around 22 m/s.
A story to be told
For the next playtest, we invite you to test the first preview of Bladesong’s prologue chapter: enter the camp at Eren Keep’s gates, fire up the field forge and make swords for those outside the city wall’s protection. Learn about the rules that govern this lawless place and explore the Lost City, an abandoned city district that has fallen into ruin and is now home to dark tales and shadows.
Artist Appreciation
The environment art shown above was painted by Jakob Eirich (Camp) and Magus Rodriguez (Outer Gate and Lost City). The Scrap Peddler is the work of Azure Meraki, who is working on various characters for Bladesong. All item icons are courtesy of Resuru.
You eat with your eyes
Resuru working on some eye candy.
As we go along, we are constantly working on new sword parts for the library, as well as other tweaks and extensions.
We overhauled our material system, unifying blade and part materials, allowing polishing (which was previously only possible on the blade) on sword parts, and decoupling some materials like leather or cord wrap from their “dyes” so we can very easily add more colours to the game now.
In addition, we changed our environment handling so that the actual surrounding and the light setup can be picked independently.
The same old sword in the same new surrounding with three different light setups.
The Next Playtest
…doesn’t have a date yet, but is approaching rapidly and will be public free-for-all once more. If you’re new, request access on our Steam page and we’ll let you in when we’re there. If you’ve taken part in a playtest before, Bladesong Playtest will silently reappear in your library.
Thank you for reading. We hope you are just as excited as we are for what’s to come – make sure to join our Discord to let us know what you think!
– David and the Bladesong team ⚔️
