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The Legend of Khiimori News

The Legend of Khiimori Demo is Part of Steam Next Fest!

[p]Hello Couriers!

We’re beyond excited to announce that The Legend of Khiimori is taking part in Steam Next Fest, and you can, for the first time, try out the game with the release of our demo, which will be available until the end of Steam Next Fest.



The 90-minute early access demo offers a glimpse of the rich gameplay systems and majestic world players will get to fully experience when The Legend of Khiimori launches in Early Access on November 4th!

In the demo available during Steam Next Fest you can:
• Begin their journey by delivering goods and messages across a vast, beautiful open world to build their prestige and reputation
• Ride, care for, and manage their horse’s health, stamina, and mood to ensure their horse stays strong and reliable
• Craft medicines, purchase upgrades, and trade or breed horses with unique traits
• Defend themselves against wild predators using archery and survival skills

Set in 13th century Mongolia, The Legend of Khiimori invites players to step into the role of a brave courier rider navigating a vast, untamed landscape on an unforgettable adventure. Players will need to breed and train horses with specialized abilities, plan their routes strategically across diverse environments, and master the challenges of the wilderness to complete their quests.

Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game showcases stunning, high-fidelity graphics and unparalleled realism in equine behavior and animation, delivering a truly immersive horseback exploration experience.[/p][p]

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Developer Diary #14 | News about Game’s Title, Languages & Alpha Playtest Survey

[p]Dear Couriers, we have a collection of juicy updates for you today once again, so let’s dive right in:

[/p][h2]Title Update[/h2][p]
As of today, our game’s title has been updated to The Legend of Khiimori – We are amicably parting ways with the Windstorm brand in mutual agreement between IP holder Alias Entertainment, developer Aesir Interactive and publisher Mindscape.

This decision reflects the evolving creative direction of the project. As the game has grown, shaped by the in-depth feedback and enthusiasm of our community, so has our vision for what The Legend of Khiimori can become. We’re confident that this change will be a benefit to our project and our vision for the game, as it has developed over the past year and a half since the initial announcement.

[/p][hr][/hr][h2]Alpha Playtest Insights[/h2][p]
As many of you know, we’ve been running an alpha playtest with our Kickstarter backers for a few months now! Last month, we conducted a proper survey to gauge people’s opinions on our WIP game, and we’re stoked to share some of the results with everyone!

The people who took part in this survey are our alpha backers, and as such, are hugely invested in the game, and so their opinions might be a tiny bit biased (we love them though!) So with that being said, here's what we found from our survey:
  • 90% are really happy with the World Design

  • 85% would recommend the game in its current state to their friends!

  • Over 80% agree that our human and animal animations in the game are good!

  • The biggest points of criticism at the moment are Inventory Management, Performance, and Collisions (getting stuck), with 30-40% of backers agreeing that those aspects of the game aren’t good in their current state yet. We agree with the backers, and are actively working on improving these aspects, see details below!

The tester insights are super helpful for us to understand where to focus our efforts in these last few weeks before the Early Access release and right after. An overhaul of large parts of the user interface and user experience has been underway for the past months, which is an important step for us to improve player guidance and how we convey information to you in game. This also affects the Inventory Management pain point reported in the survey!

The issues our backers are experiencing with collisions in the open world are crucial to enabling satisfying navigation. Figuring out the best way for horses to react to rocks, slopes, cliffs and every sort of terrain is a complex issue: we want to strike a good balance between the realism of which terrain horses can reasonably be expected to move across, and the smooth gameplay fun of exploration, so that going off the beaten track does not feel punishing. We’re working intensively on improvements to this collision logic at the moment.

Performance optimization is another ongoing priority: Our game is high in detail and intricate in terms of ongoing behaviors and systems influencing each other, which makes smooth performance on mid-range hardware a challenge. Our dev team is constantly improving on this front, and we expect it to stay a highly relevant topic throughout Early Access.

Since the demo we showed at gamescom, we’ve also added more scripted tutorial quests, added more variety to courier quests and fleshed out our prestige system for developing your reputation as a courier over time.

In short: we have loads of work left to do for Early Access, and we fully expect to receive a lot of additional feedback and reports from you all in November, so we can further improve the game! Remember that the Early Access release isn’t the end of our development process, but the place where all of you get to join in!

[/p][hr][/hr][h2]Language Info[/h2][p]We can now confirm that our game will be translated into 33 languages with the Early Access Launch! Please note that this applies to in-game text specifically.

At Early Access launch, The Legend of Khiimori will be available in: Bosnian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian. 

We’re particularly excited about having the game translated into the Mongolian language, which often isn’t a priority in game localization, but was a no-brainer for us considering the game’s setting and cultural inspiration.

What about voice acting? We’ll have more info on our voice casting soon, but we can already tell you that the game will not be fully voice acted for the Early Access launch. You’ll hear our main character Naraa react to her environment and the gameplay action in English, but please expect all in-game dialogues exclusively in written form for the time being. With the game’s main narrative content being planned for later, we currently need to maintain flexibility on dialogue contents – adjustments are much, much easier to make to text content than to voice lines.

[/p][hr][/hr][h2]Ready for Early Access?[/h2][p]We’ve said this before but we want to take the opportunity for clarification once again: At Early Access launch, some issues with performance, stability and functionality are to be expected. Thanks to our Alpha Playtesters and their diligent bug-reporting, we’ve already done a ton of work on this front, but we’re bound to discover new issues as player numbers scale up.

We’re in this for the long haul and we’ll do our best to deliver fixes and improvements over the months to come. The best way for you to help us in this is to send reports, be patient with us, talk to other people in our community for help if desired, and give us the time we need to turn this game into the best it can be, with your feedback and your support.

Thank you so much for your ongoing trust and enthusiasm! We’re beyond thrilled to have you all on board and we can’t wait for everyone to finally get their hands on the game very very soon.

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

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

[p]Dear Courier Riders, we have a lot of incredibly exciting news for you today, so let’s dive right in:
[/p][h2]Gameplay Overview Trailer[/h2][p]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,[/p][p][/p][p]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! [/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]You’ll note that the end slate of the trailer confirms our release date: The Legend of Khiimori will come out in Early Access (PC only) on November 4th 2025!
[/p][hr][/hr][h2]Gamescom Booth[/h2][p]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 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![/p][p][/p][p]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.


[/p][p]But the undoubted highlight of the booth was of course our Ger and our special guest, Zolzaya Boldbaatar![/p][p][/p][p]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 performance on our TikTok Channel[/p][p][/p][p]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.[/p][p][/p][p]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.[/p][p][/p][p]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![/p][p] [/p][hr][/hr][h2]Press Coverage Recap! [/h2][p]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!
[/p][p]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:[/p][p][/p][p]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.[/p][p][/p][p]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.[/p][p][/p][p]We’re flattered, and we’re a bit scared 😅. [/p][hr][/hr][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 Legend of Khiimori team![/p][p][/p][p]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][p][/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![/p][p][/p][p]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. 😇[/p][p][/p][p]Further highlights from our Gamescom plans include:[/p]
  • [p]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. [/p]
  • [p]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. [/p]
  • [p]There’s going to be a photo wall, because we love giving attendees an opportunity to brag to their friends.[/p]
  • [p]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![/p]
  • [p]… 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. 😔 [/p]
[p]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! [/p][hr][/hr][h2]Gameplay Trailer[/h2][p]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!
[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]
Get a glimpse at what route planning, item gathering, powder pouch throwing and general storm-weathering will look like in the game.
[/p][hr][/hr][h2]Stream Highlights[/h2][p]
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: [/p]
  • [p]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[/p]
  • [p]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. [/p]
  • [p]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. [/p]
  • [p]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.[/p]
[p]
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]

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Developer Diary #11 | Thousands of Bugfixes and Other Improvements

[p]Times are busy on the 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][/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][/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][/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][/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 fine-tuning 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 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][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][h3]Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:[/h3]

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