Haunted Shores
Haunted Shores is Getting a Facelift
So, after evaluating all the feedback, we have decided to head in an exciting direction. Haunted Shores is now being ported to Unreal Engine 5. This move will allow us to utilize the various systems Unreal offers that are industry changing, highly performant, visually light years ahead and provide a more efficient workflow to developers.
Here are a few tidbits:
Multiplayer - Yes, we heard you. We are implementing co-op into Haunted Shores. Multiplayer was always on the back of our minds. We just needed to take a deeper look at scale and gameplay in order to make it viable in the HS world. Making it viable brings us to the next bit of information.
Open World - Adding a multiplayer element to HS really meant getting into the world and looking at where we could expand, and how/where to add more content to make it worthwhile. In other words, the island has grown ... exponentially.
POIs - Open World Multiplayer means we need to give you all more to do. So, we are adding more POIs to the Island. These POIs will be home to some crazy characters and will give players a better objective flow.
Objective Flow - So we love linear games, but we enjoy being able to make decisions and take our own direction sometimes. So, we have opened up the objective flow to resemble a more open world/open story approach where the player can decide how they would like to proceed through the HS world.
Unreal Engine 5 - Everyone has probably seen at this point that Unreal Engine 5 has released. With that came Nanite which is a huge improvement to performance with the handling of draw calls and a myriad of other technical improvements. Lighting got an upgrade with the Lumen system which looks absolutely amazing and provides a much more realistic light bounce and global illumination. It also opens up the full C++ libraries natively which gives more control over the mechanics and systems at a lower level (easy explanation). C# is great but C++ is "way more better" XD. I could go on and on.
We believe these changes will absolutely take Haunted Shores to the next level and deliver a more optimized, immersive and in-depth experience to our player base. We appreciate your patience as we've been quiet for a while working out the plans for the migration and we look forward to sending out a release soon.
Wildebeest Labs
Haunted Shores 0.5.0
Complete upgrade to HD graphics.
Optimizations performed for increased performance,
Weather added,
Lighting Optimized.
Haunted Shores Structure Change
We've completed our list of bug fixes, and confirmed that Haunted Shores is fully stable. There are a couple different quality updates we will be doing in the near future, but its likely nobody will notice as they are very minor and don't affect gameplay at all. Just things on our personal list that we feel will make the game more polished.
We will also be changing the Steam structure of the game. We feel that Haunted Shores in its entirety is absolutely a good value at 19.99, however this is not what is currently available, so our pricing structure will be changing to a per Chapter charge of 4.99 for the first chapter, currently available on Steam now. Further chapters will be uploaded to Steam in a DLC format, and will have a similar charge. It may be a little more, or may be a little less depending on the amount of time and content that particular chapter provides.
These changes make Haunted Shores more affordable for everyone and our main priority has always been to give players a fun experience, and this change will make the game more accessible to all.
Steam has assisted us in creating a separate back-end for this change. Those individuals whom have already purchased Haunted Shores for 19.99 will receive all of our future updates and all Chapters at no extra charge. Moving forward after November 16th, Purchases will be for a Chapter at a time. and each chapter will have to be purchased as a DLC.
Following the quality updates that are planned for the next couple of weeks, Haunted Shores will transition out of early access and Chapter DLCs will be added to the full release following a strict series of quality tests and extensive gameplay tests.
As always we encourage any and all feedback, and look forward to serving the community for years to come.
Thank you for all of your continued support. Without you, none of this is possible.
Wildebeest Labs