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Developer Diary #20 | Courier Video & New Key Art

Dear Couriers!

We’re excited to share something truly special with you this week! Enjoy our new five‑minute gameplay video, “A Day in the Life of a Courier”, captured directly from the current build.

[h2]A Day in the Life of a Courier[/h2]
The video features commentary from our experienced Design Director, Steve, who guides you through a full gameplay loop.

You’ll follow Naraa through one complete, eventful day in 13th‑century Mongolia, from preparing her deliveries as a thriving Yam courier to facing the many challenges of the open wilds.

Watch the video here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We are quite happy of how everything is coming together, and we can’t wait for you to experience it! What did you think of the video above? Did you enjoy it? Any feedback? Please let us know below, or join our Discord for in‑depth discussions and everything The Legend of Khiimori.

[h2]New Key Artwork Revealed[/h2]
We are also proud to unveil our new Key Artwork today!

It showcases the tone and atmosphere of The Legend of Khiimori, from the vast Mongolian landscapes, to the bond between Naraa and her horse, as well as the spirit and challenges of the Yam courier tradition.

We hope it gives you a good sense of the world that we are building for you.

New Key Artwork

[h2]Reminder: Khiimori Merchandise[/h2]
Once again, our BackerKit Shop has opened to the public and everyone can buy The Legend of Khiimori merch there! Some hot items are already available and more will be added in the future. Please note that the merchandise from the BackerKit Shop will not be sent out until the full-release of the game, and that the game itself is not available via the BackerKit Shop

Another delivery, for another day…

Any questions? Like our flow? Please comment below :)
Your Team at Aesir Interactive

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

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Developer Diary #19 | Early Access Launch Features & Roadmap

Lovely Couriers! Our Early Access release date is inching closer and closer, and our team is working hard to fit the most valuable improvements into the bit of time we have left to make the best first impression we can.

For today’s dev log, we want to dive more deeper into what you can expect from Early Access now that we’ve spent additional time on it, which updates to expect after the initial launch and which aspects of the game will take longer still.

[h2]System-Driven Gameplay[/h2]
In our last dev diary, we already talked a bit about systems and story, but we’ll reiterate it here because this is an important topic we want our players to be aware of: Do not expect a main story in our Early Access release. The initial version of the game will have plenty of missions and things to do, but our focus is on discovery through exploration, and the hundreds of small personal stories that emerge from the gameplay itself, depending on the routes you take and the paths you go down. This also means that what a “playthrough” of the available content will look like can vary a great deal between players!

With that being said, we do have a special narration-related treat for you today, and that is an exclusive first look at our Intro Cutscene!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Voice Acting[/h2]
As you can hear in the video above, we are incredibly proud to introduce Erica Baatarbold as the voice of Naraa! Erica is a native speaker of both English and Mongolian, and we’re beyond thrilled to have her on board. Stay tuned to hear more from her very soon!

For the Early Access release, voice-over will only be available in English and Mongolian. Our focus is on conversations featuring Naraa herself, and we’re working with eight voice actors per language to give life to our most important side characters as well as generic NPC dialogue. Not all dialogue will be voiced over for Early Access, since many texts are still subject to change.

We’re particularly happy to offer Mongolian language support, both in the voice over as well as in all dialogues and UI: Mongolian is often a low priority in localizing video games, and very few games come in Mongolian at all. Since Mongolian people’s roles are often limited to enemy hordes shouting commands, hearing regular dialogue in the language is rarer still.

Facial animations are already in(n) as well

[h2]Recent Additions[/h2]
With the extra time we’ve had since moving our release back a few months after the Next Fest Demo, we’ve tried to improve on the most urgent fronts, based on the feedback we’ve gotten from people who played the public demo, as well as from the Alpha Playtesters who backed us on Kickstarter.

Exciting recent additions and updates include the following:

  • We overhauled various aspects of the the horse riding controls, as explained in more detail here. The changes include animation reworks, physics-based movement and iterating on controls while keeping what was already working well.
  • We added new items to craft and use, such as additional arrow types, powder pouches and other recipes
  • We created additional mission types and updated our cargo missions
  • We added Outpost Stables that allow for the player to change horses while on a long journey, including options to upgrade them
  • We added places where your hard-earned in-game resources can be invested for permanent upgrades such as building bridges or upgrading certain locations.
  • The map now contains more points of interests with specific rewards and challenges – we won’t spoil the details on this one though!
You got an interesting point there

[h2]Upcoming Updates[/h2]
As you all know by now, Early Access is not the end of the road. We’ll absolutely keep our eyes and ears open for urgent feedback and reports, but we also have a lot of specific improvements already planned for the coming months:

For example, we plan to:
  • Overhaul portions of the user interface for better looks and easier understanding, such as the Horse Overview, Merchants, Crafting and parts of the HUD
  • Improve direct player feedback on things that are affecting your horse, e.g. what is causing its stamina/health conditions
  • Add more NPCs for the player to interact with, and making those NPCs feel more alive by making them busier and more emotive
  • Improve animal behavior AI for both horses and wildlife
  • Add more prominent wind and weather effects that affect you while riding, e.g. with the wind at your back giving you a speed boost
  • Further planned changes on our immediate to-do-list are iterating on cargo balancing, active item collecting and powder pouch gameplay feel.


Note that most of the Stretch Goals unlocked during our Kickstarter campaign will not yet be available in the Early Access release but are planned for later down the road, in time for the launch! For a closer look at what’s planned, we recommend keeping an eye on our Roadmap Trello Board!



[h2]The Game You Want[/h2]
When discussing our Early Access expectations, our Game Design Director recently put it best: Early Access is a process. There’s the game that we have, and there’s the game that our audience wants. Even after months of playtesting and improving, there will inevitably be a gap in between those two things. Early Access is the tool that allows us – through your reviews, feedback and discussions – to find out precisely where that gap is, and to fix it in time.

For that, we hugely appreciate your patience and your passion, so we can together shape The Legend of Khiimori into the best game possible.

13th century Mongolia and its diverse landscape

[h2]Khiimori Merchandise[/h2]

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign? Then we have some great news!

Our BackerKit Shop has opened to the public and everyone can buy The Legend of Khiimori merch there!

Some hot items are already available and more will be added in the future. Please note that the merchandise from the BackerKit Shop will not be sent out until the full-release of the game, and that the game itself is not available via the BackerKit Shop.

Feel free to spread the news as this is a direct way to support the development of our game for those who have missed out on the original Kickstarter.

What deliveries will the villagers request?

Thank you for your time, and stay tuned for even more exciting news and information about the game next week!

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

[hr][/hr][h2]Join the Community[/h2][p]Bluesky Facebook Instagram Threads TikTok Twitter

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]

Developer Diary #18 | Taming the Open Wilds of 13th Century Mongolia

Dear Couriers,

We hope you had a nice holiday and we wish you all a “Happy New Year 2026” - the year of our Early Access launch!

As you can image the team is super excited (and super busy) to make sure the Early Access launch of The Legend of Khiimori on March 3rd, 2026 on Steam will be successful.

[h2]The Road to Early Access[/h2]

As described in Dev Diary #16, the priorities we set ourselves are about adding new features as well as polishing what’s already there:


Basically, we want to make sure that the four main pillars of the game are already fun and accessible once we launch into Early Access:

  1. Authentic Horses
  2. Believable Setting
  3. Vivid Open World
  4. Enjoyable Mechanic
Ideal spot for a Courier Rider to take a break
[hr][/hr]
[h2]Rethinking Horse Movement[/h2]

A: The Challenge

Horses are at the heart of The Legend of Khiimori. We want them to feel alive and authentic: powerful when galloping, precise when navigating tight spaces, and responsive to player input. Our initial custom movement system achieved much of this, but as development progressed, we hit some walls. After many discussions, we decided to take a leap of faith and rebuild parts of the movement from scratch, striving to ensure that the new movement will be more responsive and fun to ride!

We took our playtester’s feedback to heart, which repeatedly mentioned the following issues:

  1. Horse Behaviour & Controls
    Especially turning, jumping, and braking did not feel dynamic enough.
  2. Invisible Walls
    Player movement was restricted to ensure the horse only went where it makes sense. But what makes sense to us is not always what players like to do, right? ;)
  3. Animation Stuttering
    Animations sometimes glitched. Thus, we decided to overhaul the animation system as well.

On top of that, the old system grew more and more complex and harder to maintain: any rebalancing would take longer than intended. So we took a jump into the unknown and decided to rebuild it from scratch, with the potential to bring the movement to the next level!

B: The Consequence

After prototyping and testing a completely new approach, relying more on the Unreal Engine physics simulation, we decided to take the leap for a full migration. Both, the movement controls and animations are being rebuild.

Of course, scope is still a challenge. Games like Read Dead Redemption 2 have over 6.000 motion matched animations, which would blow our budget. So we have to decide where to focus our efforts, and where to make compromises.

Not everything will work perfectly right away, and we need your feedback during Early Access to get the most out of the new system.

C: The Outcome

Once migration is complete, you will notice:
  • Smoother riding
  • More responsive controls
  • Natural obstacle handling
  • Greater freedom to go where you like
  • Larger horse variety
  • Better performance

Horses are the soul of our game, and getting their movement right is non‑negotiable. This wasn’t just a technical refactor: it was about delivering the experience players deserve.

The new system is cleaner, faster, and unlocks many new possibilities, up to level designers being able to introduce more movement‑related challenges, making you rely more on your riding skills… and face more severe consequences if you fail.

We are not 100% done yet, and things will still need to be polished, but ultimately, this opens up a more realistic and fun riding experience. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters most!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]First impressions of new CCC

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Systems vs. Story[/h2]
Did the headline grab your attention? Great, because it is an important topic for the Early Access version of The Legend of Khiimori that will be a system-driven rather than a story-driven experience (for now). So, why is that a good thing?

Generally speaking, story-driven games carefully guide players through a predefined narrative, offering powerful authored moments.

System-driven games, however, hand over that authorship to the player. Instead of being told what the story is, players create their own through interacting systems: movement, survival, traversal, consequences, and choice. Every decision, mistake, and unexpected outcome becomes part of a personal journey that exists only because you played the game the way you did.

This is what makes system-driven games so compelling: no two, self-written stories are the same, and the most memorable moments aren’t scripted cutscenes, but (in a best-case scenario) hard-earned triumphs, near-failures, and exciting journeys that emerge naturally from the world itself.

We hope that you will play an active part of this journey, giving us feedback (ideally via Discord), commenting on the game and thus creating a mutual success story!

System-driven: “Ride” your own stories!

Are you looking forward to our Early Access launch? Do you have any questions for us? Please feel free to post a comment below. 🙂

[hr][/hr][h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3]
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Developer Diary #17 | 2025: A Year in Review

What a Year

The year is drawing to a close! We’ll take this opportunity to get sappy for a moment and recap all the incredible things that have happened in these past twelve months.

A Year in Review

[h2]Kickstarter [/h2]
We started the year by getting everyone hyped up for our Kickstarter campaign to pad our game’s funding.

We smashed our humble initial goal of 60k € within less than 20 hours and raised just over 500k € total from 8889 backers, which allowed us to plan for various exciting additions like more horse breeds, extra crafting and cooking content and falcon hunting. The Kickstarter campaign wasn’t only a financial success, but led loads of you to hear about our game in the first place, getting us to an impressive 100 000 Wishlist additions on Steam.

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Alpha Playtesting[/h2]
With the Kickstarter campaign, we promised the almost nine thousand backers access to an alpha playtest, which we were able to deliver on by May 15th. By now, a bit over four thousand backers have redeemed their Alpha access, with the rest of you waiting for the game to be more complete or to become available on your respective hardware. (And if you WANT to playtest but haven’t gotten access for some reason, please reach out to us!)

How much time individual testers have spent with the game varies quite a bit! Some of you gave the game a brief try, others are already diving in deep: 59% of alpha players played an hour or more, putting our median playtime at 1h and 23min. There’s a few hundred players who already played the game for 20-50 hours! While we completely understand anyone who wants to wait for a more polished experience, it’s incredibly valuable for us to have the insights from that 5% of players who spent 20+ hours, and who can give us more in depth feedback about the game.

For another fun number: our playtesters have sent in over 13000 bug reports! 😵

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Gamescom[/h2]
Another highlight this year was our visit to Gamescom in Cologne in August. Gamescom is the world’s largest gaming event, and exhibiting our game on one of the main show floors along with the giants of our industry has been incredibly exciting for us as developers… AND it of course gave lots of you an opportunity to try the game first hand!

We did not only bring a bunch of gaming stations to the event, but an entire Mongolian ger! The booth received musical accompaniment from Zolzaya Boldbaatar, who also provides horsehead fiddle and traditional Mongolian throat singing sounds for our game’s music. Check out the pictures and videos in our post from September, if you’ve missed them!

A Ger for Naraa, Solid Snake, and Lady D.

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Next Fest Demo [/h2]
October brought our next major milestone: We made a public free demo available for everyone during Steam’s Next Fest. Although the playtime was limited, a lot of you were able to try the game’s mechanics for the first time and give us valuable feedback. The Next Fest was a huge success: over 50 000 people played the demo, catapulting us the rest of the way into the 200 most-wishlisted games on steam and over the 200k wishlist milestone!

The insights and preview coverage we received for the demo let us tweak our priorities for what has to be done before Early Access release, and we’re looking forward to sharing a much-improved Legend of Khiimori with you all next year.

They grow up so quickly (humble blush)

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Press Coverage[/h2]
Getting any attention of the gaming press isn’t always easy for developers outside the AAA mainstream, but thanks to the successes outlined above, we got quite a bit of lovely coverage throughout the year! Here’s your chance to catch up or re-read, if you’ve missed any of it:

(Note that since some of these articles are a few months old, they might contain outdated information such as our game’s old title or outdated release date information)

GamesRadar+: “This stunning open-world horse game smashed its $65,000 Kickstarter goal straight away, and it's bringing my favorite part of Red Dead Redemption 2 to 13th-century Mongolia.” Read

Polygon: “Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori has some of the most realistic horses we've ever seen in a game. 13th-century Mongolia is the setting for a horse game unlike any other.” Read

GamesRadar+: “This open-world game where you're a 13th-century Mongolian horse courier immediately proved more hardcore than anything Death Stranding 2 could offer” Read

IGN Germany: “Finally a good video game about horses? Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori fulfills deep-seated wants” Read

PC Gamer: “[…] the most detailed steed mechanics I've ever seen – Be right back taking a quick course on horse genetics.” Read

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Community Contests[/h2]
We’ve recently ran a handful of community contests on our Discord, and we could not be happier with the results. Over the past weeks, we’ve asked you to participate in a scavenger hunt within our Demo, and asked you to draw fan art of our main character Naraa. You have absolutely delivered! To celebrate our wonderful players and fans, we want to highlight some of your submissions for the recent fan art contest that took place in our community. We are legitimately in awe of the skill and creativity you’ve shown us here.

Finalist: Contest Entry by ampule

Finalist: Contest Entry by Claudia1103#

Winner: Contest Entry by agentequus

[hr][/hr]
[h2]A Heartfelt THANK YOU[/h2]

These dev diaries are usually about us and what we’re doing, but we want to dedicate this one to you, our players, followers, backers and supporters. Thank you for being an incredibly patient and lovely bunch of people and for keeping up your incredible energy despite some delays on our end. We see you all advocating for our game, creating social media content and fan art, and recommending our game in countless reddit threads at every opportunity. You are the best ambassadors we could hope for, helping us spread the word about this unique thing we’re making into the wider gaming world. Please know that every single one of you is appreciated, and that we do not take your support, your kindness or your patience for granted.

Many, many thanks for joining us on this wild ride ❤

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

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Developer Diary #16 | Our Updated Roadmap to Early Access

Dear Couriers,

It’s time for another dev diary, and today we want to give you a bit more insight into what we’ll spend the next few months doing. As you’ve probably heard by now, we’ve decided to delay our Early Access release from November 4th, 2025 to March 3rd, 2026, so today let us give you more detail on where that extra work time is going.

The priorities we set ourselves are about adding new features as well as polishing what’s already there! A lot of the work we’ll be doing might well be invisible to players, since it’s the kinds of thing that leave a negative impression when done badly, but don’t necessarily stand out as a positive when working well.

And you might see new additions that we haven’t talked about yet on top of the below.

[h2]Guidance and Controls[/h2]
Camera and Controls are and remain huge topics for us: From the very start of this game’s development in early 2023, we knew we wanted to nail down “CCC” (that’s Camera, Controls and Character) as soon as possible… and then we ended up revisiting it across several playtests anyway! This is a crucial and complex part of the game, and it therefore has required quite a bit of iteration, and it still does. We want the controls to be easy to pickup without adding unnecessary friction, but also offer the kind of depth and variety that horse game fans love, like extending and collecting your gaits. We’re trying to span the width of preferences people have for controls by giving you a lot of options to customize your game experience.

We’re incorporating a lot of feedback we’ve had from our players from the Demo these past few weeks to improve horse controls and camera. For example, we are adding framing options so you can adjust the camera’s offset and distance from the character, and we’ll give players the option for the horse to stop automatically upon dismounting.

This also means that if you first play the game and you don’t like the controls, please try out different settings! We’re counting on our community to help each other out here as well - though we’re doing our best to provide guidance, experienced players helping new players find the best settings for their preferences can be a wonderful advantage of having such an active community!

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Performance and Optimization[/h2]
The Legend of Khiimori is a detail-rich game, which makes it quite demanding to run. This is why we’re revisiting our presets for Low and Medium quality in order to improve what the game looks like even on less powerful hardware.

In addition, we are adding notifications and adjusted error messages that will better inform the user about issues impacting their performance. For example, the game will let you know if your hardware is below minimum specs, if your drivers are outdated, or if you have installed the game on your HDD instead of your SSD. We see value in this because — as already covered in our last dev diary — the Demo and the discussion around it has shown us that we are reaching a lot of players for whom those things might not be all that familiar yet, so we do our best to help these people be able to play.

We’ve also added support for all major upscalers (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) and will support frame generation which further should boost performance and to a certain degree also image quality, and further work has gone into reducing hitches when playing the game.

Here too, we realize that players’ preferences vary a lot, so we are adding more settings for graphic features that are subject to personal taste, such as motion blur. In all of these aspects, from visuals to controls, please try out different settings if you’re not happy with the looks or with how some things work and behave.

The diverse landscape of Mongolia

[hr][/hr]
[h2]World and Design[/h2]
We’re further fleshing out the depth and strategy around route planning: Parts of the map are becoming more challenging to traverse, which means more decisions to make about whether you dare to tackle difficult terrain that demands skillful riding or choose longer but gentler routes to you want to take your time and reduce the risk of injury to your horse.

We’re also updating the resource gathering while riding, inspired by the spectacular real-world ‘Tenge Ilu’ sport in which riders from the steppes hang from their saddles to snatch coins and other items from the ground at high speed. We can only recommend watching some video of it, it’s SO cool.

Also on our to do list for the immediate future: upgrading Yam Network outposts to add useful features such as hay, water and cooking fires, additional crafting recipes and improved balancing for existing ones, and extra mission types for variety and challenge in your life as a courier.

In short: We have a LOT to do! We’re doing our best to juggle urgent player feedback from the demo along our own vision and priorities and we once again thank everyone for your patience as this amazing game project has grown far beyond our initial plans and expectations.

Winter is coming (work in progress)

[hr][/hr]
[h2]Top 200 Wishlists! [/h2]
We have another nice little bit of exciting news: The Legend of Khiimori is now in the 200 most wishlisted games on Steam!

This number doesn’t come with any benefit, but it is a very clear sign that people want to play this game, and that the audience for a horse riding focused open world game with some crafting and gathering, survival mechanics and delivery missions is quite significant. Thank you all for being here, and for being patient with us 💖



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

[hr][/hr][h2]Join the Community[/h2][p]Bluesky Facebook Instagram Threads TikTok Twitter

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]