Later This Month: A Valley Without Wind Beta

Arcen Games have been busy tinkering away with their experimental procedural explore-and-survive 'em up A Valley Without Wind, and they've got news for us. Last month they teased us with footage, flaunting its newly reinvented sidescrolling makeover. This month Chris Park of Arcen games has taken to his blog, to unveil a whole host of new details about the game's design, and features that they are including. Shall we take a look?

Discussed are changes that have been made to permadeath:

Our goal with the permadeath mechanic, unlike in roguelike games, has never been to punish the player or end the game. Rather, what we're trying to do is craft a large and meaningful world where actions matter -- and what action is more narratively meaningful than someone dying? That person is then gone forever, and people may have emotional reactions to this, etc. It's one of the few truly one-way doors of the human experience.

The thorny topic of difficulty settings:

When you start a new world it will now first ask you for a Strategic Difficulty and an Action-Adventure Difficulty. If you aren't sure what you want, you can take your best guess and then change it at any time while you're playing. You'll never have to start a new world just because your feelings on the desired difficulty level have changed. But splitting out this difficulty lets people have a difficult strategic experience and an easy action-adventure experience, or vice-versa, or anything in between.

And also revealed is news that later this month they are going to be releasing a single player beta version to all preorder customers, and they'll be gradually updating on a "daily-or-nearly-so" basis until it's ready for 1.0 release, hopefully early next year.

Read all the latest on A Valley Without Wind, straight from the horses mouth, right here.