Bloodhunt’s Public Early Access: Founder’s Season is coming to an end, and we’d like to thank everyone who has participated in this first phase of development! Over the course of Early Access, we’ve seen a tremendous level of support from our ever-growing community with over 2 million accounts created and 26 512 898 kills clocked up!
Your feedback has helped us immensely in understanding where our game shines but also where we need to work harder to meet the high standards that both we as developers and you the players expect.
The plan was to launch the game this year for both PC and PS5 as we moved out of Early Access: Founder’s Season. Based on key learnings from this early season, we have decided to take the time needed to address the valuable feedback we have received and postpone the release until early 2022. During this period the public servers will be taken offline.
Bloodhunt Founder’s Season is coming to an end and public servers will close on Monday 22nd of November at 10:00 CET.
So, what does this mean for the players?
Servers:
- From Monday, November 22nd, at 10:00 CET, servers will be taken offline to ensure the development teams full focus on the implementation of feedback collected during the Early Access: Founder’s Season.
- All players who have been a part of the Founder’s Season as well as last minute newcomers who join before the season ends will be able to participate in exclusive, invite only tests leading up to release.
Store:
- Effective as of today at 20:00 CET no more Tokens will be able to be bought in the game.
- Existing Tokens in players accounts can be spent in store but past 22nd of November at 10:00 CET they will retain value and carry over to Season 1 next year.
- All those who joined us on the Early Access: Founder’s Season journey will receive a ”Founder’s Token Pack” doubling the Tokens purchased up until this announcement. Players will receive these additional tokens at launch of Bloodhunt next year.
Battle Pass:
- A massive XP boost will be activated from today until the servers shut down on 22nd of November at 10:00 CET to enable players to finish their Founder’s Battle Pass progress.
In-game Progression:
- All unlocks and purchased items will be carried over to player profiles for the full launch along with journal collections and statistics.
We hope you join us on the streets of Prague leading up to the 22nd of November, celebrating the final nights of the Founder’s Season!
Looking at our game during the Early Access phase, we can see that we have a good core when it comes to game mechanics, graphics, balance, and general feel, but we need more time to work on things that you have been asking for such as improving performance, better ways for players to report cheaters and more overall reasons to continue playing.
With the additional development time, we will be focusing on the following:
Performance
Our top priority is ensuring a smooth, stable gameplay experience. Improving performance will be a major effort requiring adequate time for investigating, optimizing, and testing. We have received lots of great feedback from you that we’re going to use to improve performance.
Cheating
While we have addressed most of the major exploits that have been reported so far and are resolving some new ones that seem to have cropped up recently, we are not satisfied that our processes and systems are where they need to be. We are currently investigating various solutions for making it harder and more frustrating for banned players to create new accounts, looking at better reporting tools, and even evaluating other anti-cheat vendors. We hope to be able to share more information soon.
Player & competitive experience
We are also working on lots of other improvements including a better onboarding experience, more interesting and varied goals to work towards, session streamlining to ensure more playing and less waiting. When it comes to defining your vampire, there will be more qualitative variety of fashionable and cosmetic content that you can use to personalize your vampire. There are of course a few more surprises we’ll be talking about more closer to release.
The launch of the game will also include statistics which will be provided by our friends at Tracker Network together with an improved competitive experience for new and advanced players.
The PTE and Ranked initiative will also continue on our Discord as per usual.
Preparing for greatness
When we launch Bloodhunt next year, we want to ensure that both the PC and the PS5 version offer a fantastic high-quality experience as we will be marketing the game heavily towards players that may never have played or even heard about Bloodhunt previously.
We hope that this will enable many new players to not only play Bloodhunt but also engage with the fantastic community that has been built up around our game in this very short time period, and we hope that our core community will continue to help us spread the good word about Bloodhunt.
We will be sharing more detailed information about these topics in the upcoming months.
Content Creators
For our content creators, any playtests that we will be doing during this pre-launch period will be NDA free and we will make sure to invite you to try out new features and have your say about our progress.
Lastly, we just wanted to thank every player, journalist, and content creator for the support they have shown us, and we can't wait to see you in Prague again in Early 2022 on PC and PlayStation 5!
As usual we’ll be on Discord answering questions at Discord.gg/Bloodhunt
/The Bloodhunt Team at Sharkmob
