The developers behind Caves of Qud have been outlining what the next few months has in store for them and their roguelike.
The year will culminate with the release of Caves of Qud in late 2024, which comes after a 15 year journey for the game. And it’s far from done…
The Spring Molta Open Beta
Between now and launch there’s going to be an open beta to iron out the final wrinkles. In fact, it’s already in closed beta.
The so-called Spring Molta Beta is coming in two weeks and it is going to include a new interface (see the picture below). Here’s what Freehold Games wrote:
- The much-touted, transformational UI redesign is complete! Fully mouseable, fully gamepaddable, and gorgeous, but all carefully designed to maintain the essence of what makes Qud Qud.
- a refresh of the starting town of Joppa, with as much texture & lived-in feeling as the rest of the world
- hundreds of new sound and visual effects
- 40 new achievements
- several new narrative touches, big bug fixes, & performance improvement
Over the summer and autumn the plan is to finish the final narrative arc of the game, which has been long-in-the-making, and we’re promised a few surprises along the way.
There’ll also be a new, more hands-on tutorial and the starting town, Joppa, is getting a revamp. It has been a while since I visited, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it has evolved.
Caves of Qud post launch plans
Caves of Qud is set to launch in late 2024, but the team is already thinking ahead and plan to support the game with post-launch content.
To that end, there are already two big DLCs planned, but it’s not decided if these will be paid-for expansions or free upgrades.
There’s also a mention of how the team is planning to “best support other platforms” – which could mean things like support for Steam Deck and other PC handhelds, or it could mean something more interesting. It’s something to keep an eye on, at least…
“It’s not urgent or pressing, but we want to make sure we don’t code ourselves into a corner if/when the time comes to maintain several control schemes, hardware, etc,” the developer wrote.
All in all, this is a pretty significant announcement from Freehold. The studio will continue to work on the project and I look forward to seeing how this one develops in the coming months. Finally, you can hit this link if you want to read all of the details in the Steam post.
