Horizon Reaches Beta
Horizon is a dopey looking 4x game - or will be a dopey looking 4x game. Then again, with Iceberg Interactive standing behind their back, we can hope for the game to have at least some potential. Anyways...
...it has finished its Alpha! It was on Steam Early Access - the program born out of our primal need to buy as many cats in bags as possible - and the player had several months to play, hunt for bugs and complain incessantly. It has all paid off now, what with the game entering Beta. Here are the major changes:
- A.I. now dynamically adjusts its aggressiveness against the player
- A.I. now plans and executes various military actions with the help of an overall mastermind, several types of tacticians and a fleet coordinator
- Improved path finding for ships (always a good thing in my book)
- A more balanced game economy and colony population rates
- Colony management will now require more decision-making and allow for specialized worlds
And here some less exciting changes:
- A race report view has been added that keeps a history of major events relating to the race
- Additional story missions have been added
- 12 new Human ship designs added
- Improved UI and higher resolution animation scenes
- Galaxy generation with many more stars for bigger and longer gameplay sessions
- Many fixes and better handling of non-standard windows system configurations
Clearly high on pride for his baby product, Raffi Parsekhian, CEO at L3O Interactive. had this to say:
"We are very excited with Horizon's development, having moved to the next stage!. The feedback from our early adopters has been terrific and while we have integrated many great suggestions already, we want to continue on this path during Beta on Steam's Early Access program. Horizon already offers a compelling 4X experience and we are looking forward to enhancing it further as it continues to evolve with the help of 4x strategy gamers."
You heard it, kids, it might be a contender for Endless Space! Or maybe even Sword of the Stars 2... as if that was hard. So, are you waiting for it?