The Legend of Khiimori News

Dear Couriers,

Today we’re announcing a delay to the Early Access release of The Legend of Khiimori until March 3rd, 2026.

The wonderful reception during Steam Next Fest has led to us sitting down with our publisher and together we have decided to take more time to create a more feature and content-rich experience! While this does mean that you all have to wait a little longer to get your hands on Khiimori, it also means we’ll be able to make sure you get a better game when we do release into Early Access.



We would like to thank everyone for participating in Steam Next Fest, trying out the demo and leaving us with valuable feedback. While it’s clear a huge number of people are enjoying the demo, we believe that it is the right decision to delay to March. This will give us an even stronger foundation to build from when we enter Early Access and then begin the collaborative development of Khiimori with all of you!

With that being said, we’re pleased to announce that as a result of the delay, the demo will not go offline as originally planned on October 20th, but will stay online until November 30th, 2025.

We will spend the time to work on the following areas as our primary focus and then also try to get in as much as we can until the start of Early Access, everything that does not get addressed until then we will deal with during Early Access. Please have in mind that this is not a complete list and we will adapt to use the time as wisely as possible to create the best possible game experience for you:

• Player Guidance and World Experience
• Camera, Controls, and UI
• Lowering Minimum System Requirements
• Performance and Optimization
• A more feature and content-rich experience

We understand that many of you may have hoped for different news today, but rest assured we will continue to pour our hearts and souls into The Legend of Khiimori and harness this opportunity to deliver a satisfying Early Access for everyone!

If you haven't downloaded the Demo, yet, there's no better time than now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3669260
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[h2]The Legend of Khiimori[/h2]
[h3]Steam Next Fest Demo Patch 1.1[/h3]



Howdy Khiimori Couriers! We have a treat for all you Demo enjoyers out there: a mid-week patch!

[hr][/hr]
🛠️ Patch Notes:

🦠Bugs & Technical Improvements

• Fixed a commonly occurring crash tied to "StackOverflow Error"
  
• Fixed an Issue where AMD GPU users have transparent floors
  

🧪 Quality of Life Improvements

• Moved the Key rebinding Menu to a much more prominent spot in the Settings Menu
  

[hr][/hr]
📅 What’s Next?
Please continue delivering your feedback! We have dedicated channels in our official Discord server, so join us and be part of the conversation for this Demo and all future phases of The Legend of Khiimori!
🔗 https://discord.gg/AesirInteractive

If you haven't downloaded the Demo, yet, there's no better time than now!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3669260
[hr][/hr][h2]Join the Community[/h2][p]Bluesky Facebook Instagram Threads TikTok Twitter

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]

[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]

[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p]
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[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]#02 | An Open World[/p]
• [p]#03 | PC Early Access[/p]
• [p]#04 | Horse Training and Horse Care[/p]
• [p]#05 | All Eyes on Khiimori[/p]
• [p]#06 | Cantering towards Crowdfunding[/p]
• [p]#07 | Looking Forward to Next Year[/p]
• [p]#08 | Updates from the Steppe[/p]
• [p]#09 | Survival on Horseback[/p]
• [p]#10 | Early Access Expectations[/p]
• [p]#11 | Thousands of Bugfixes and Other Improvements[/p]
• [p]#12 | Join Us at Gamescom! (and Other Updates!)[/p]
• [p]#13 | EA Release Date, Gameplay Trailer & Gamescom Highlights[/p]

[p][/p]

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[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]Polygon: The Legend of Khiimori has some of the most realistic horses we've ever seen in a game.[/p]
• [p]GamesRadar:Smash hit kickstarter open-world game The Legend of Khiimori shows off the beauty of its Mongolian setting[/p]
• [p]IGN.de (German): The Legend of Khiimori angespielt: Kann es das Pferdespiel mit Red Dead Redemption 2 aufnehmen?[/p]
• [p]GameStar (German): Diese 19 gamescom-Spiele MÜSST ihr sehen | FYNG-Show[/p]
• [p]GamePro (German): The Legend of Khiimori verrät endlich, wann wir auf unseren Pferden durch die mongolische Steppe reiten dürfen[/p]
• [p]Mein MMO (German): Shooter ade: Warum zwei Gamescom-Hits beweisen, dass die Gaming-Branche Frauen als Spielerinnen immer noch unterschätzt[/p]
• [p]NewsEule (German): The Legend of Khiimori – Ein episches Abenteuer zwischen Pferdefreundschaft und Survival in den Weiten der Steppe[/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]

• [p]#02 | An Open World[/p]
• [p]#03 | PC Early Access[/p]
• [p]#04 | Horse Training and Horse Care[/p]
• [p]#05 | All Eyes on Khiimori[/p]
• [p]#06 | Cantering towards Crowdfunding[/p]
• [p]#07 | Looking Forward to Next Year[/p]
• [p]#08 | Updates from the Steppe[/p]
• [p]#09 | Survival on Horseback[/p]
• [p]#10 | Early Access Expectations[/p]
• [p]#11 | Thousands of Bugfixes and Other Improvements[/p]
• [p]#12 | Join Us at Gamescom! (and Other Updates!)[/p]

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

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]