As of today, I've pretty much wrapped up development of the Beta 4.0 release of Legionwood 2, having completed all of the remaining content in Act II, and now all that remains is a couple of weeks of testing and some final polishing.

In the game's current form, all of the new content is completely playable from start to finish (and all up there's ~3 hours or so of new content to look forward to) in a basic and unbalanced manner, and most of the new events and scripts are working fine. Theoretically, I could release the beta now and players would be able to get right up to the beginning of the game's third act, but I want to spend a few weeks to a month from now thoroughly testing and polishing this new content to make sure it's all balanced and bug free upon release. I've contacted some of my old beta testers to help me with this, and they'll be receiving WIP builds of the game in the next few days.

In particular, I want to make sure that all of the morality based content in the new release is working as intended, and I'm also going to do a quick sweep of the game to rebalance the morality system in general to make sure that the game's choices and consequences aren't heavily skewed to one side over the other. The new release is intended to have equally valid reasons to play through the game with either positive or negative morality, and the game's plot reaches a huge turning point at the end of Act II with the death of one of two characters (determined by the player's morality). Ultimately, the goal is for Legionwood 2 to have multiple possible endings and for the player's choices in game to determine what the will (or won't) encounter in their current playthrough.

I've also made the decision to slightly revise the game's story into a three act structure, rather than mimicking the four chapters of Legionwood 1. Legionwood 2 will henceforth be divided up into an Act I, Act II and Act III (with the Beta 4 release containing the entirety of the first two acts). My reasoning behind this is that the game's second act, Aftermath and Alliance is already quite long and covers quite a bit of the game's backstory -- it's already at least as long as the first two chapters of the original Legionwood combined -- and what I'd planned for the last two chapters of the game is quite small in comparison, so it made more sense to combine Chapters 3 and 4 into a larger Act III which matches the scope and progression of the previous two acts. Overall, not a very significant change, but to me at least it helps make the game's story progression seem more fluid.

All of these final touches and polishes shouldn't take me longer than 2 or 3 weeks to complete. However, I am returning to university next week, and so my free time will suddenly become a little less readily available, which may impact on my progress and delay the release a little more (though I still hope to get this testing period over and done with as soon as I can). At the moment, I'd tentatively give mid to late March as a release estimate, though please don't hold me to that. I just wanted to let you all know that development is still going smoothly and that Beta 4 is all but complete sans a few final touches, and that you'll get the chance to play it soon. Stay patient!

More updates are to come closer to release. Thanks for your continued support.