Fangs of Asterkarn Development Update - June 2025

[Zantai]

@Trilkin

My assumption as to why this was actually done - and I am aware there is a L O R E reason, but I’m also assuming that was retroactively decided - was because none of your other products are anywhere close to a release and you needed something you thought would have a reasonably rapid development schedule to a) remind people you’re still actively working on stuff and are salient as a studio, b) it acts as advertising for the RTS, and c) you need money. There’ve been no formal announcements for FF in over a year, and the last playtest update made it clear you’re not close to a full release there either. I’m not going to speculate WHY this is happening because developing anything is complicated and time consuming and I am certainly acknowledging that, but I also have to acknowledge that it has happened and this is the timeline we’re in.

If we were running out of money, splitting our focus to make another product would be the absolutely dumbest thing we could have done. If our goal was to quickly rake in some cash for a third expansion, we would have taken preorders and rushed something out. Hiring another 10 developers (that’s +50% company size, by the way) since the expansion was announced would also make absolutely zero sense if we were “running out of cash”.

Also apparently we’ve been “running out of cash” for nearly 2 years, so that’s a pretty long time to be clawing along without outside investment.

Reality is, Farthest Frontier has already blown past our expectations for Early Access with over 1.5 million copies sold. It has crushed Grim Dawn’s numbers in the same timeframe. We are financially secure, and most importantly, we are steadily growing.

@Trilkin

It sounds like what actually happened is that you did, in fact, expect rapid release of the expansion, but scope creep crept in. You tacitly confirm pretty much all of this in this post, but you still do it with relative hostility and defensiveness. ‘No, really guys, it’s going to be super duper good, just give us time.’ doesn’t mix well with ‘Stop giving us shit for constantly delaying the thing we said we’d release almost a year ago.’

People that are running out of money don’t suffer from scope creep. We have live products that are selling well and reviewing well, and we are taking that money right around and improving those products without raising the price tag. What I did admit was that we stopped thinking about a due date and just kept making stuff, because we have the luxury of doing so.

So yeah, when someone is giving us shit for missing an ESTIMATE, we are not particularly receptive to that. And when wild theories like this start slinging incompetence our way, I will not be receptive to that either.

@Trilkin

What you probably should’ve done was just be honest from the outset about the expansion’s development cycle. A plain ‘hey we’re blueprinting a new expansion for Grim Dawn while we’re finalizing our other major thing, please look forward to it’ without expectations or release dates would’ve probably gone over way better. You still would’ve caught some hostility from people through the updates about the expansion’s content that followed, but at least it would’ve came off more as a development diary than as a means of advertisement for a product with an imminent release date. The way it was announced had all of the language of something that was largely feature finished and that was a reasonable expectation for an expansion to a 10 year old game.

We didn’t set a release date…

If you’re gonna type me up a thesis on these wild theories, at least do your homework.

@deen

Wile im sure this is not the case, im getting scam citizen flashbacks from this…more is always good, but someone at some point needs to step on the breaks

How…we’re not taking preorders…what would the logic even be?