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The BLADESONG PLAYTEST is coming: June 26–July 10 ⚔️

[p][/p][p]This playtest will feature a completely revamped CAMPAIGN MODE including a first narrative section at the gates of Eren Keep, as well as CREATIVE MODE for pure swordsmithing freedom 🔥[/p][p]Request Access now![/p][p]The playtest is public and free for all! If you have played previously, Bladesong Playtest will simply be unlocked again on June 26 – nothing you need to do.
[/p][p]Thank you all for your patience, can't wait for this next step towards Bladesong's release!
– David and the Bladesong team ⚔️
[/p][p][/p]

The Cutting Edge | DevLog #1/2025

Dear swordsmiths,

while you’ve been patiently waiting for news from the forge, we’ve been hard at work on a number of exciting Bladesong things. A lot of what you’re about to read is in progress, but it’s time we speak about it, so let’s dive in!



While the exact date drifts in the mists of prophecy, we’re excited to confirm that Bladesong will be released into Early Access in 2025! Until then, we’re planning to have at least one more public playtest and launch a proper demo ahead of the Early Access release.

[h3]Q: What will the playtest/demo/EA include?[/h3]
A: Our two core pillars are the story-driven Campaign Mode and the sandbox Creative Mode. We’ll let you know details closer to each date.

[h3]Q: Can I preorder Bladesong?[/h3]
A: Thank you for asking! You support us devs a lot by wishlisting the game on Steam now, and then even more by buying it on release date. The bigger the splash on that day, the more visibility Bladesong will get.

[h3]Q: What have you been working on since the last playtest?[/h3]
A: Glad you asked! Let’s dive in ⚔️

[h2]Campaign Mode[/h2]

Next to Creative Mode (which we’d consider decently battle-tested by now), the latest playtest in December 2024 showed a first, early version of the Campaign Mode – and your feedback helped us see that some of our ideas simply didn’t work in practice. Being practical people, we went right back to our literal drawing board and rethought Campaign Mode from the ground up.



Our most important goal was to make Campaign Mode more approachable and to allow for more exploration and creative tinkering.

Commissions are the gameplay heart of Campaign Mode – customers coming with physical and stylistic requests for swords that you are tasked with fulfilling. Our new approach gives you the freedom to explore and try things out on your sword before committing to your actions. To make your blacksmithing journey more interesting, we have added resources such as steel, leather and wood that you can obtain from various vendors, and more special things that you’ll find as you progress through the story.

The trusty Scrap Peddler and his stock.


We have also heard your feedback that gameplay felt a bit disconnected from the narrative, so we have worked on tying these two layers together. For example, customers now come with their own personalities and stories that are complemented by the swords you make for them.

In the early days of development, we focused on getting the swordmaking tech down in Creative Mode, making sure you get the tools you need to create the swords you want to create. For Campaign Mode, we have now made swordmaking more immersive: hammer away and deform the steel blow by blow! The tech under the hood is still exactly the same, so you keep all the precision and freedom you had before, and in Creative Mode, you will always be able to choose the previous editor-like controls if you want to take things fast.



Last but not least, we have worked on the way we analyze and rate swords. In Bladesong, your sword will get points in impact, swiftness, agility, and a few more categories – faithful to real-world sword physics, but also distilled and well-explained, so you don’t need to whip out your Mechanical Engineering textbook while playing.

Tracking the sword’s point velocity of the best Oberhau I could pull off. This one came out at around 22 m/s.

[h2]A story to be told[/h2]
For the next playtest, we invite you to test the first preview of Bladesong’s prologue chapter: enter the camp at Eren Keep’s gates, fire up the field forge and make swords for those outside the city wall’s protection. Learn about the rules that govern this lawless place and explore the Lost City, an abandoned city district that has fallen into ruin and is now home to dark tales and shadows.



[h2]Artist Appreciation[/h2]
The environment art shown above was painted by Jakob Eirich (Camp) and Magus Rodriguez (Outer Gate and Lost City). The Scrap Peddler is the work of Azure Meraki, who is working on various characters for Bladesong. All item icons are courtesy of Resuru.

[h2]You eat with your eyes[/h2]

Resuru working on some eye candy.

As we go along, we are constantly working on new sword parts for the library, as well as other tweaks and extensions.

We overhauled our material system, unifying blade and part materials, allowing polishing (which was previously only possible on the blade) on sword parts, and decoupling some materials like leather or cord wrap from their “dyes” so we can very easily add more colours to the game now.

In addition, we changed our environment handling so that the actual surrounding and the light setup can be picked independently.

The same old sword in the same new surrounding with three different light setups.

[h2]The Next Playtest[/h2]
…doesn’t have a date yet, but is approaching rapidly and will be public free-for-all once more. If you’re new, request access on our Steam page and we’ll let you in when we’re there. If you’ve taken part in a playtest before, Bladesong Playtest will silently reappear in your library.

Thank you for reading. We hope you are just as excited as we are for what’s to come – make sure to join our Discord to let us know what you think!

– David and the Bladesong team ⚔️

PLAYTEST EXTENDED until December 16th!

It's been great to see you all go crazy with the new swordmaking parts and features, to get your feedback on this first preview of Campaign Mode, and of course to go through some more exciting Community Challenges with you! To make sure everyone can participate, we've decided to extend the playtest over this coming weekend, and let the final community challenge run for 48h instead of the usual 24h. More on that tomorrow! ⚔️

Hope this suits you well, big thanks to all of you!
– David and the Bladesong team

New medieval sim Bladesong turns Skyrim's most useful mechanic into a full game

If you want the best weapons and armor in Skyrim, you've got to put the work in. To even get anywhere close to crafting Daedric and Dragonbone equipment you need to cut your teeth on as many swords and helms as possible. Or, you can do as we all did back in the day and craft thousands of iron daggers instead. However you choose to get the best equipment, there's no denying that it's an essential part of truly becoming Dragonborn. If you found Skyrim's weapon crafting system lacking, though, Bladesong is the game for you. This medieval swordsmithing sim is packed with intricate details, and you can try it right now.


Read the rest of the story...

The Playtest is live! | The Cutting Edge Special Edition

It’s time, blacksmiths – the BLADESONG PLAYTEST is here! In this special edition of our “The Cutting Edge” DevLog, we are going to summarize all the goodness, big and small, that you’ll find in this playtest.

In A Nutshell
  • Added: A first preview of Campaign Mode gameplay
  • Added: A first narrative location, The Den
  • Added: Playtest available in five languages (English, German, Japanese, Polish, Simplified Chinese)
  • Swordmaking: Morphing of sword parts (stretching/bending)
  • Swordmaking: Sinking of sword parts to close gaps
  • New Parts: Hexagonal grip set (grips, risers, ferrules)
  • New Parts: Various new pommels
  • New Parts: Rectangular Pointed quillon
  • New Parts: Two rain-guards (round and hexagon)
  • Usability: Tweaked behaviour of blade editing gizmos and various abilities
  • Fixed: Blade jitter when using high curvature values (this might change appearance of strongly curved swords from the previous playtest)
  • Fixed: Crash bug when deleting ability while dragging gizmos
  • Performance: Improved performance of blade editing
  • Performance: Improved performance in scenes with 3D environment (floor, anvil etc.)

Let’s have a closer look at some of these.

Campaign Mode

We’ve been laying the swordmaking foundations with Bladesong’s Creative Mode for some time now, so let’s start showing Campaign Mode some love!

In Campaign Mode, you take the role of a blacksmith who arrived in Eren Keep, a last haven of a dying world, to forge swords for guards, mercenaries, common folk and others. Customers request certain physical properties, and it’s your job to make the right sword for them.



We’ve started building this gameplay mode quite some time ago to gather publisher interest (before signing with the fantastic Mythwright folks). Initially, the commissions were all manually set up, which proved to be both work-heavy and fairly rigid. Instead, commissions are now based on randomly generated swords that increase in complexity as you unlock more abilities, get access to more vendors and learn to craft new sword parts.



Once we have a sword, we analyze its physical properties and build a commission based on that. Keep in mind that this “origin sword” is one possible solution – but not the only one! You’re always able to solve commissions in multiple creative ways.

With enough solved commissions under your belt, you will level up and explore the skill tree to unlock various kinds of goodness:



New Swordmaking Features

The big new feature for Bladesong’s swordmaking core is Part Morphing. Remember when sword parts used to be static, lifeless pieces? Well, no more. From now on, they will bow to your will.



This also means that grip parts (that used to scale only in a single direction) now scale like everything else, and can be stretched with the new morphing feature. If you don’t want any bend, hold [Shift] to constrain.

With bent parts, you might run into situations where gaps occur that you’d like to close. Bladesong now allows you to sink parts into each other using the [ , ][ . ] keys.



New Sword Parts

In the last edition of The Cutting Edge, we’ve already shown you the Lionhead pommel we’ve been working on, which has become the base for a tech rework to be able to make parts with much higher fidelity (read: supporting baked normal maps and ambient occlusion maps). While we’ll never neglect our beloved historic sword parts, this now also allowed us to finally foray into fantasy territory with some new pommels. Here are some examples:



Narrative

The plot of Bladesong thickens, and with this playtest, we wanted to give you a first idea of how we’re planning to integrate narrative into the swordmaking and shop management gameplay. Things got a bit bigger than planned, so enjoy around 10,000 words of written dialogue in The Den, Eren Keep’s tavern where everyone’s welcome.



What’s next?

The Playtest is live now until December 13. We are excited to see your creations and to hear your thoughts, so please join our Discord and say hello! We will be in touch soon regarding the popular Community Challenges.

Thank you all for joining in!
– David and the Bladesong team ⚔️