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Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori News

Developer Diary #13 | EA Release Date, Gameplay Trailer & Gamescom Highlights

Dear Courier Riders, we have a lot of incredibly exciting news for you today, so let’s dive right in:
[h2]Gameplay Overview Trailer[/h2]
During Future Games Show last week, we revealed a brand new gameplay trailer! In it, you can see a first look at archery and hunting, as well as how players will be using powder pouches against hostile wildlife, in addition to a bunch of new footage of crafting, exploration, surviving in rough weather and more. For the very first time, the trailer features the voice of Erica Baatarbold as Naraa – we’re thrilled to have found a voice actress of Mongolian heritage for our main character and are super excited to continue working with her!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
You’ll note that the end slate of the trailer confirms our release date: Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori will come out in Early Access (PC only) on November 4th 2025!
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[h2]Gamescom Booth[/h2]
Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori has had its own booth at gamescom in Cologne! We were exhibiting our game in Hall 8 alongside gaming giants such as World of Warcraft and Lego. A little bit intimidating? Yes, but also a wonderful opportunity!

Our booth had eight gaming stations that let players play a time-limited Demo of Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, along with some additional PCs where people could play Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature, an adventure game being published by our friends at Mindscape. PC gaming stations were generously provided by Mifcom, who also let us raffle one of two high end gaming PCs during the event!
The 2nd giveaway started already and ends this Saturday, September 06, 11:59 pm CEST! Check out our Instagram and X post to read the terms and conditions.



But the undoubted highlight of the booth was of course our Ger and our special guest, Zolzaya Boldbaatar! Zolzaya, who has also made various contributions to the game’s soundtrack, played the Morin Khuur (horsehead fiddle) and performed traditional Mongolian throat singing for our booth guests while they lined up to play the game. His presence and the Mongolian Ger sure worked as an eye catcher even among the crowded and flashy booths around us!

Check out his perfomance on our TikTok Channel

In our Gamescom Demo, players were given a mission to deliver two stone stele into the nearby mountains. To get there safely, players had to select a horse with increased endurance to resist the bitter cold, prepare by crafting frost resistance tonics, and plan an efficient route through the icy mountain pass. While the demo included a first look at our archery mechanic and players could defend themselves from roaming wolves with bow and arrow or scented powder pouches, the main challenge here was nature itself, and weathering the elements.

We’ve also made the Gamescom Demo available to our Kickstarter backers during the event, to hopefully cut through the FOMO of those watching from home a bit. Have you played it? What did you think of the example missions? Did the mountain traversal offer a welcome challenge, or did anything cause frustration along the way? We’d love to hear your thoughts!


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[h2]Press Coverage Recap! [/h2]
At and around gamescom, our game got a bunch of attention from German and international games media that we’re super excited about. We highly recommend a look at these videos and articles to learn more about the game!
Considering the occasional comparison to Red Dead Redemption 2 that we keep getting both from games media as well as from casual observers, we just want to add this bit of clarification again: We’re hugely flattered, that our game reminds anyone of Rockstar’s 2018 hit – we definitely consider the game an inspiration, and we would be thrilled to scratch any peaceful horse game itches that game has left you with. But we want to remind everyone once again that even as a moderately sized studio, we’re working with a fraction of the budget and resources of Red Dead. We’re doing our very best to live up to the various expectations we see from players, but we hope that once Khiimori releases in November, the game will be judged on its own merits as an open world survival adventure game with a focus on horses, rather than being expected to live up to direct comparisons to one of the most expensive games ever made.

We’re flattered, and we’re a bit scared 😅.

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[h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3]

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Developer Diary #12 | Join Us at Gamescom! (and Other Updates!)

[p]Welcome back to another dev diary from the Windstorm team!

We have a collection of different bits of good news for you all today. What this post lacks in a coherent theme, it makes up for in juicy details about various topics.

[/p][h2]We’re Headed to Cologne![/h2][p]
We’re thrilled to announce our presence at Gamescom in Cologne this month! While individuals from the Aesir and Mindscape teams have been around the conference floor to discuss courier rider business, this year’s event marks the very first time that our game will be playable for the public!

Our booth design is still work-in-progress, but we’re incredibly excited about what we have planned. Let’s just say if you’re there, you should keep your eyes peeled for anything looking like it belongs into the middle of the steppe rather than a crowded show floor. 😇

Further highlights from our Gamescom plans include:

Play an exclusive ~15-minute demo of the game! Not only is the game playable for the public for the very first time, but the exclusive Gamescom version will feature some Archery gameplay that we haven’t shown anywhere yet as a special treat! We’ll have enough gaming stations set up for up to twelve people to play the game at a time.
We’ll have a special guest on site with Zolzaya Boldbaatar! He is part of the Bavarian-based traditional Mongolian band Khukh Mongol, plays the Morin Khuur (horsehead fiddle) among other things, and has contributed some wonderful work to our game’s soundtrack. We’re thrilled to have him at our booth on Wednesday and Thursday to play live to some of our gameplay sessions.
There’s going to be a photo wall, because we love giving attendees an opportunity to brag to their friends
Thanks to a collaboration with Mifcom, we’ll be giving away one of two customized high end Khiimori gaming PCs at Gamescom. The second one will be raffled off online so our international fans can participate as well!


… and a lot more! We’re still getting everything set up, so who knows what we might add! Unfortunately we probably won’t be able to import an entire herd of Mongolian horses for marketing purposes. 😔

Our team on site will be meeting with press and content creators, so if you’re reporting on the event and want a personal tour of the Gamescom demo version, do get in touch with us!
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[h2]Gameplay Trailer[/h2]
Keen eyes will have already spotted it on our Store Page, but for anyone who hasn’t checked in for a bit: we recently released our very first gameplay trailer!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Get a glimpse at what route planning, item gathering, powder pouch throwing and general storm-weathering will look like in the game.
[hr][/hr]
[h2]Stream Highlights[/h2]

On July 28th, the Aesir team went live on Twitch and Youtube to show you the latest (stable) version of the game and answer a bunch of questions! You can find the complete stream recording right here, but let’s summarize some highlights and provide timestamps:

  • We’ve moved our Early Access release window from “Summer” to “Fall” of this year. This gives us a bit more time to include some of the new features and ideas from the Kickstarter as well as make sure that the start of the Early Access will be an enjoyable experience for our players. We’re also getting a lot of important feedback through our Alpha Playtest at the moment, which we want to address and fix before the initial release. Timestamp
  • Our Senior Artist Valentin explained a bit about how coat colors and genetics work in our horse breeding mechanics (timestamp). Later in the stream (timestamp), he showed some cool details about the horse’s visuals like our updated coat rendering, how white markings turn visible skin on muzzle and eyes pink, and how white markings near the mane now correctly impacts the color of mane hair.
  • We showed some of the injuries and illnesses our horses can get, and how such things can be treated. Around this timestamp, you see our QA Director Jackie demonstrate crafting treatments for her lame and injured horse.
  • We’ve also been asked whether horses in the game can die: the answer is no, we don’t feel like that fits our vision. Valentin and Rupert explained this choice in a bit more detail at this timestamp.


You’ll notice throughout the stream that our answers to many questions of “will the game feature XYZ” boils down to “maybe, depends on how the Early Access release goes”, outside of some definitely planned core features. This isn’t vague marketing speech from our end, but an attempt at transparency: the truth is that the success of our upcoming Early Access release – measured by both commercial and critical reception – will inform our strategy moving forward.

Many people on our team are incredibly passionate about this project, but passion in the end isn’t what pays people’s bills, so we’re dependent on our game’s reception in terms of reviews and sales in order to commit to improvements and further updates beyond what’s been planned and promised through out Kickstarter campaign. Your support – in telling people about the game, and in forgiving us for things that might not be perfect in the initial release yet – is invaluable for that, and we’re immensely grateful for it!

For more on what will/won’t be part of the Early Access release, make sure to check up on this dev diary from May and to keep an eye on our Trello Roadmap!

Thank you for reading, and let us know if we’ll get to meet you in Cologne!

[/p][hr][/hr][h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3][p]
#01 | To the Steppes
#02 | An Open World
#03 | PC Early Access
#04 | Horse Training and Horse Care
#05 | All Eyes on Khiimori
#06 | Cantering towards Crowdfunding
#07 | Looking Forward to Next Year
#08 | Updates from the Steppe
#09 | Survival on Horseback
#10 | Early Access Expectations
#11 | Thousands of Bugfixes and Other Improvements
[/p][hr][/hr][h3]Join the Community[/h3][p]
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Developer Diary #11 | Thousands of Bugfixes and Other Improvements

[p]Times are busy on the Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori team at Aesir! Today we want to give you a closer look behind the scenes and tell you about some exciting things that have been happening in the past few weeks.[/p][p][/p][h2]Alpha Playtest Reports[/h2][p][/p][p]As the Kickstarter backers among you know, our Alpha Playtest has been underway since about mid-May. Access to the Alpha Playtest was an exclusive backer reward during our Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, and the campaign’s success means that from one day to the next, we went from having about 20-30 people (that is, our developers and our QA people) playing the game, to over 8000.[/p][p]The math is simple: 8000 people can find a whole lot more issues a lot faster than our handful of dedicated QA people who test the game professionally every day, by sheer force of numbers. The result? We received thousands of crash reports and bug tickets these past few weeks, and our tech people have invested a lot of their time into digging into the reasons for crashes and issues and fixing them.[/p][p]Testing with such a large number of people has its pros and cons: on the one hand, the large volume of crash reports lets us easily see which crashes affect the most people. In order to analyze these reports efficiently, we created a separate tool that sorts crash reports into an excel sheet, counts duplicates and thereby tells us which issues are the most urgent to address. At the same time though, the huge volume of reports generates additional overhead on our end. And while we end up receiving duplicate reports of many issues, we still want players to report what they see, so we don’t risk certain problems slipping under the radar because everyone assumes it’s a known issue already.[/p][p]Over on the community side of things, we’ve also tried to educate our many playtesters on what makes out good bug reporting, since the difference between (for example) “my horse looked really weird at some point” and “my horse’s animations broke after repeatedly mounting and dismounting while standing in the river” can be immense to any of our devs who want to reproduce the bugs in question to find out what is actually going wrong.[/p][p]Addressing these most severe bugs and crashes has been our first priority, because we will only be able to gather valuable qualitative feedback (such as which features players are enjoying, which improvements are needed, etc.) once people aren’t kept from actually playing by fundamental technical problems. And we’re very glad to have the chance to address so many crucial problems early on, rather than only learning about them at Early Access release. 💪[/p][p][/p][p]We’re also thrilled to finally push an update for playtesters today that properly supports mission saving and loading![/p][p]
[/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][h2]A Hundred Small Steps Forward[/h2][p]While the bug fixing and crash hunting efforts have kept several of our techies very busy, the rest of the team has been able to move forward with a lot of other matters: “small” improvements in the grand scheme of things, but all valuable contributions to making our game a big and beautiful whole down the line:[/p]
  • [p]Our level designers have encountered an interesting problem: many of our travel distances in the game were too short at the moment, not really leaving the player enough room to encounter interesting challenges along the way. This has led to a lot of careful planning on how to expand the game map. Our goal is that any courier mission is never as straightforward as “ride from A to B in a straight line”, but that players will always face some options and decisions along the road thanks to mechanics such as difficult terrain, resources along the way, dangerous wildlife, various points of interests and other obstacles.[/p]
  • [p]Optimization is an ongoing progress that won’t be “done” until the game itself is “done”, but our tech team has made a lot of important progress recently that allow the game to run a lot more fluently on the lower spec end of our target hardware. One such change is that the activity of NPCs and Wildlife updates based on player proximity, so far off NPCs don’t consume as much processing power as the ones you’re looking at up close.[/p]
  • [p]Our Horse Breeding Interface is heavily being worked on and we’re excited to share a new teaser: the plan is that by using specific food items, you can influence the outcome of your foal’s looks – all within the genetically plausible, based on our coat color genetics system. Where a real life pairing between two palomino horses can randomly result in a chestnut, palomino or cremello horse for example, we’ll give our players a bit of influence over that result, if they choose to invest the resources.

    [/p]
[p]Note that the Interface is still in WIP. These screenshots may not represent what anything looks like in the final game.
[/p][p][/p]
  • [p]Our animators been creating and finetuning various animations for characters and horses: most recently, they’ve prepared animations for horses threatening to kick, the horse nuzzling the player character for treats, and a foal clacking its teeth in deference to older horses. We’ve also started working on character stances and horse reactions that will become relevant in our horse taming mechanics later on, but remember that those will likely not make it into the initial Early Access release just yet.[/p]
[p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p] Note that the animation is still in WIP. These assets may not represent what anything looks like in the final game.[/p][p][/p]
  • [p]Our tech artists have been improving our waterfall rendering, layering particle effects on top of a spline mesh for the right amount of splash and foam that can be used and adjusted for various different setups from small rivulets to bigger landmarks like the famous Ulaan Tsutgalan in Orkhon Valley. [/p]
[p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p] Note that the animation is still in WIP. These assets may not represent what anything looks like in the final game.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p]That’s just a small selection of various small and big improvements and important steps the team has been making the past few weeks, but we hope it gives you a bit of insight into how much work and effort and thought goes into crafting every aspect of a game like Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori![/p][p]If you’re more interested in the big picture roadmap, make sure to have a look at our Trello board, where you can see how we’re progressing on various features and even leave your vote on what you’d like to see added to the game in the future! We can’t wait to show you more as we’re nearing the Early Access release.[/p][p]Last but not least, here is the link tour Kickstarter Updates for even more information on Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori: [/p][p]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aesirinteractive/windstorm/posts[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3][hr][/hr][h3]Join the Community[/h3][p]Bluesky Facebook Instagram TikTok Twitter

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Developer Diary #10 | Early Access Expectations

Welcome back to another Dev Diary!

Thanks to the massive success of our Kickstarter campaign this Spring, you’ve heard a lot of good news recently about the additional features and content we plan to add to Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori.

With community requests and stretch goals, there’s lots and lots that we want to add to the game eventually, but that doesn’t mean everything that we’ve talked about will be available in the Early Access release this Summer.

In this months' dev diary, our focus is on getting you all into the loop about what to expect from the Early Access release and which features you’ll have to be more patient for.

Bad weather can’t prevent us from reaching the top!

[hr][/hr]
[h2]What to expect from Early Access in Summer 2025?[/h2]

All aspects of the game remain subject to iteration and improvements! If you’re wondering how close to complete an individual feature is in its current state, we recommend checking out our Trello Roadmap.

So while nothing is quite “done”, there are already a lot of things you can try out and spend time with in Early Access:

  • Introductory Tasks: The Early Access release includes a first set of tasks that introduce the player to mechanics such as taking care of their horses and going about their duties as a courier.

  • Courier Quests: You’ll be able to play procedurally generated courier quests that challenge you and your horses to make deliveries across the game’s map!

  • Horse Needs & Care: Your horse has hunger, thirst and energy stats that you have to manage and take care of.

  • Gorgeous Open World: Explore the beautiful and diverse landscape of 13th century Mongolia on horseback and find collectibles and crafting materials along the way.

  • Breeding: You can already breed horses by selecting two of your horses as parents. Foals are generated based on the parents' stats and coat color genetics, and grow up to become ridable horses. What’s planned but not currently added yet are care interactions with the foal and the ability to adjust your chances for specific breeding outcomes.

  • Crafting: You can already craft some things in the game, but there’s quite a bit of polish and animations missing. More crafting recipes and fitting icons are also still to be added.

  • Balancing: Balancing is an ongoing process and we’re constantly making adjustments. Some features' balancing depends on other, currently unfinished systems however, which prevents us from finalizing the costs, stats and rates of all sorts of things.

  • User Interface: The Early Access release version already has the general shape and style of our final UI, but will contain its fair share of placeholders and some duplicate icons


In general, many of the systems and features that make up the whole game experience will be there, but not yet polished, balanced or finished. Community feedback will help us adjust our priorities for what to fix and what to add in every aspect of the game!

[hr][/hr]
[h2]What will not be available yet when Early Access launches?[/h2]

  • Taming wild horses: You’ll be able to see wild horses in the game, but taming them won’t be possible yet.

  • Hunting, Archery, Falconry: For this first phase, your interactions with the world will be mostly peaceful. We want to have part of our Archery mechanics implemented until the Early Access release, but we currently can’t promise them. You may already encounter dangerous wildlife that you have to avoid however!

  • Voice Acting: Our dialogues and writing are still WIP and we’ve decided against using lower-cost AI-generated voice overs for the game. Voice Acting will therefore come later in the process.

  • Bug-free and Stable Experience: Technical issues are just unavoidable when making a game of this size! Our QA and Tech teams find and fix a ton of bugs every day, but when you suddenly have thousands of people playing the game, they will always find a lot more! We’re shipping our game with a built-in bug reporter that we encourage everyone to make use of, and we’re immensely thankful for your patience when it comes to technical problems.

  • Optimized Performance: Performance optimization is a constant work in progress, but our game is quite demanding to run. We expect many players with older hardware to run into performance problems for now, but we’ll keep working on improvements on this front.


[hr][/hr]
[h2]What will become available when? [/h2]
We plan to regularly release patches and content updates throughout the Early Access period. We won’t have a strict update rhythm, but make new fixes, patches and additions available as it suits our development progress.

See our Trello Roadmap. for planned features and more info!

We aim to stay transparent about our development progress throughout this period using our Trello Roadmap. The roadmap shows how “complete” we consider existing features and which things are currently being worked on. The roadmap is also a tool for our players to let us know your preferences and priorities for requested features and improvements. We’re happy to add new suggestions to the board, we’d just like to remind everyone that there’s a lot of “must-haves” that we’ll work on for because they’re required for our overall vision or have been promised on Kickstarter, and that those “must-haves” will take priority over additional community requests.

Enjoy the last remaining minutes before the next courier quest begins

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Should you get the game in Early Access or wait?[/h2]

It always depends on what you want as a player! Here’s what we recommend to help you decide:

[h3]Get Early Access if…[/h3]

  • you want to give us constructive feedback and help us improve the game over time

  • you’re excited to see it all come together over time, even if it means seeing the a placeholder here or there for now

  • the occasional bug or crash doesn’t ruin your experience but motivates you to send a report and help us fix it through our built-in reporting tools.

  • you want to actively influence the development process by voting on features and priorities

  • you want to support the development team financially and thereby increase the game’s overall quantity and quality: every unit sold and every review helps us get more visibility!

  • you can’t wait and just want to play the game as soon as possible, even if it’s not quite meeting all your expectations yet

[h3]Wait for later/Full Release if…[/h3]
  • you want a finished, balanced, polished game experience that wows you from start to finish

  • you want a game that’s as stable and bug-free as possible

  • you aren’t all that interested in being involved in the development process

  • you’re a bit skeptical if the game’s going to match your taste as a player and live up to your expectations

  • you don’t have a powerful gaming PC and might want to play the game on consoles instead, once that’s possible
Any questions or feedback? Feel free to leave a comment!

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[h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3]

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Developer Diary #9 | Survival on Horseback

Welcome back to another Dev Diary, couriers!
Today we want to dive into the survival and exploration aspects of our game. We know that some of our wonderful players are already sold on the idea of simply being able to ride a horse through a gorgeous environment, but some of you long for meatier gameplay and today we want to give you all some insight into what that will look like in Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori.


[hr][/hr]
[h2]Surviving on the Steppe[/h2]

To successfully navigate the Mongolian Wilderness, you will have to keep an eye on and take care of the hunger, thirst, stamina and health of your horse and avatar. How easy or hard it is to keep these gauges filled depends on the environments you move around in: Drinking water might be easy to find in green valleys, but scarce on missions to the Gobi Desert, and on trips to snowy mountain peaks it might be harder to forage for food and find appropriate shelter.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Thanks to the success of our Kickstarter campaign, we’ll also be working on expanding our Crafting systems to include Cooking, which will let players collect ingredients - from plants they find to animals they hunt - and prepare nourishing meals for themselves or their horse while traveling.



But that's not all! By reaching the “On the Hunt” Stretch Goal, we will also offer advanced hunting: Fishing, new Animals and a Hunting Glossary will be added to the final game.




[hr][/hr]
[h2]Progressing in an Open World[/h2]

While we want to give players a lot of freedom to explore the vast Wilderness, there will also be areas that can only be reached once certain conditions are met. In our design process we’re calling these limitations “progression gates”. Though of course ideally, they will be almost invisible to the player in the end and just feel like organic continuation.

What this might look like in the end is that you reach a river that you can’t traverse unless your horse possesses a special skill for extra jump capacity. To eventually overcome this obstacle, you’ll have to find some NPC in the world who can help you train your horse in this particular skill, or breed new horses for specific attributes.




[hr][/hr]
[h2]Focus and Features[/h2]

Depending on your play style and preferences, you will have quite some options for which features to focus on and spend time with. Our Feature Chart aims to illustrate this:



When Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori launches in Early Access this Summer, we won’t have all of the features on this chart implemented yet. We’re aiming for a viable product and a satisfying gameplay loop that gives you something to do in the world, but doesn’t quite offer all of the planned complexity yet.

Because we want our passionate community to understand our plans for upcoming features and when to expect them to be added. We’ll soon put together a proper roadmap that’ll keep getting updated throughout Early Access, where you can see what’s planned for which update and get more info about specific features. We at Aesir Interactive would like to offer you transparency and inform you regularly about our plans for Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori.

Any questions or feedback? Feel free to leave a comment!

[hr][/hr]
[h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3]

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