After ten years of development and a few years in Early Access, it’s finally time for Urban Strife to hit the 1.0 release on the 14th. Now, while I was pretty harsh toward the game in my Early Access Impressions article, I saw great potential in the title. So it’s with some excitement I await the release tomorrow. Have things been improved?
One of the big reasons for my scathing review was the weak writing, but I might be in luck, as it seems they hired an English-speaking veteran narrative designer to go over the dialogue. Check the release video after the jump, and a quote from one of the devs I picked up on RPG Codex. It comes with curious insight about the development and somewhat somber expectations.
The quote:
“Urban Strife is going 1.0 on 14th, as you might’ve heard.
The release will bring the end of the campaign into a full circle, where what you did will count in the final shelter defense. The final siege also comes with a new zombie wave mechanic.
We have scrapped the old perks system. We kept the native bonus, but the learned perks are now profession based, have 3 levels and no limitation (you can have all those you unlocked active at any time)
We have added repairs and a Mechanic perk that makes repairs more efficient.
Game will launch with French, German, Russian, Spanish and Chinese localization. There are more in the works but will come later.
Game now has about 48 maps, all handcrafted.
We had Scott Hamm go over the dialogues and do a native proofreading (https://www.mobygames.com/person/830545/scott-hamm/). If you expect Baldur’s Gate 3 level of RPG complexity, look elsewhere. All we wanted was to use the zombie trope and tell episodic stories of survival during a pandemic, with various groups of people, subject to all kind of manipulation. We’ve all had a recent source of inspiration for that. Yes, the structure of the main quests are pretty similar, but we tried to create unique stories each time. Some came out better, some less, but I feel the effort was decent and it came from the heart.
For us this concludes more than 10 years of mad grind. We had thousands of reason to give up and only love for the game to keep us going. We won’t get rich from it. Probably won’t even make any waves in the ocean of shovelware Steam has become.
But we did it. From now to the end of our lives, we have that to tell ourselves. And it feels damn good.
Respect to all those who gave feedback here – and elsewhere. It was rough love, but it helped shape the game for the better. Maybe we didn’t execute it to your liking, but we read all you said and gave it a proper thought.
Take care now!“
– Thomas