The reveal was made through an informative developer video

Mar 25, 2014 13:14 GMT  ·  By

Cliffhanger Productions has announced today that Shadowrun Online will become available on Steam Early Access starting March 31.

Shadowrun Online was funded through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in mid-2012, managed to raise a bit more than its initial ambitious goal and promised to deliver the final product in May 2013.

The exciting announcement was made in a developer video released today, providing additional information on the game and some of the things fans can expect in the future, as well as backer rewards and prizes and addressing the concerns regarding the mobile and tablet versions announced in the past.

The video also reveals the reasons behind Shadowrun Online failing to meet its initial release date of May 2013. Apart from some hurdles related to funding and investors, the team also made the decision to build a new code base from scratch, as their previous assets were too constricting and would have required many unwanted compromises.

Things are now going well and the team is ready to unveil what they created so far, stating that it's not going to be a full game, but only a prequel to the Lockdown campaign, and that it's going to contain most of the core elements of the combat system and a bit of Player vs. Player action.

For now, there will be no hacking and character progression and items, because the team wanted to get the basic gameplay right before committing to piling up other stuff and making refinements.

The Early Release will be the most concentrated version of the base game experience, with most of the core combat gameplay implemented. It will also give players a notion of the rhythm of the game and the level of visual detail that will be found in the final build, as well as allowing the developers to gather vital feedback from the game's backers and fans.

The development team aims to add more characters, items, character progression, character creation, missions and other building blocks, with a new update coming around every 4 to 6 weeks.

Addressing concerns regarding not making a differentiation between Kickstarter backers and early access adopters, the team shared that there will be a special internal server exclusive to the team and their backers, and that server will always have the latest version installed, where the backers will be able to be the first to access the newly implemented content.

Cliffhanger Productions has confirmed that the game will still launch across all previously announced platforms, and that the PC version that will land on Steam on March 31 is simply the first version available for testing, with the others on their way around the time Shadowrun Online enters beta.