The Legend of Khiimori News

The year is drawing to a close! We’ll take this opportunity to get sappy for a moment and recap all the incredible things that have happened in these past twelve months.

A Year in Review

[h2]Kickstarter [/h2]
We started the year by getting everyone hyped up for our Kickstarter campaign to pad our game’s funding.

We smashed our humble initial goal of 60k € within less than 20 hours and raised just over 500k € total from 8889 backers, which allowed us to plan for various exciting additions like more horse breeds, extra crafting and cooking content and falcon hunting. The Kickstarter campaign wasn’t only a financial success, but led loads of you to hear about our game in the first place, getting us to an impressive 100 000 Wishlist additions on Steam.

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[h2]Alpha Playtesting[/h2]
With the Kickstarter campaign, we promised the almost nine thousand backers access to an alpha playtest, which we were able to deliver on by May 15th. By now, a bit over four thousand backers have redeemed their Alpha access, with the rest of you waiting for the game to be more complete or to become available on your respective hardware. (And if you WANT to playtest but haven’t gotten access for some reason, please reach out to us!)

How much time individual testers have spent with the game varies quite a bit! Some of you gave the game a brief try, others are already diving in deep: 59% of alpha players played an hour or more, putting our median playtime at 1h and 23min. There’s a few hundred players who already played the game for 20-50 hours! While we completely understand anyone who wants to wait for a more polished experience, it’s incredibly valuable for us to have the insights from that 5% of players who spent 20+ hours, and who can give us more in depth feedback about the game.

For another fun number: our playtesters have sent in over 13000 bug reports! 😵

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[h2]Gamescom[/h2]
Another highlight this year was our visit to Gamescom in Cologne in August. Gamescom is the world’s largest gaming event, and exhibiting our game on one of the main show floors along with the giants of our industry has been incredibly exciting for us as developers… AND it of course gave lots of you an opportunity to try the game first hand!

We did not only bring a bunch of gaming stations to the event, but an entire Mongolian ger! The booth received musical accompaniment from Zolzaya Boldbaatar, who also provides horsehead fiddle and traditional Mongolian throat singing sounds for our game’s music. Check out the pictures and videos in our post from September, if you’ve missed them!

A Ger for Naraa, Solid Snake, and Lady D.

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[h2]Next Fest Demo [/h2]
October brought our next major milestone: We made a public free demo available for everyone during Steam’s Next Fest. Although the playtime was limited, a lot of you were able to try the game’s mechanics for the first time and give us valuable feedback. The Next Fest was a huge success: over 50 000 people played the demo, catapulting us the rest of the way into the 200 most-wishlisted games on steam and over the 200k wishlist milestone!

The insights and preview coverage we received for the demo let us tweak our priorities for what has to be done before Early Access release, and we’re looking forward to sharing a much-improved Legend of Khiimori with you all next year.

They grow up so quickly (humble blush)

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[h2]Press Coverage[/h2]
Getting any attention of the gaming press isn’t always easy for developers outside the AAA mainstream, but thanks to the successes outlined above, we got quite a bit of lovely coverage throughout the year! Here’s your chance to catch up or re-read, if you’ve missed any of it:

(Note that since some of these articles are a few months old, they might contain outdated information such as our game’s old title or outdated release date information)

GamesRadar+: “This stunning open-world horse game smashed its $65,000 Kickstarter goal straight away, and it's bringing my favorite part of Red Dead Redemption 2 to 13th-century Mongolia.” Read

Polygon: “Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori has some of the most realistic horses we've ever seen in a game. 13th-century Mongolia is the setting for a horse game unlike any other.” Read

GamesRadar+: “This open-world game where you're a 13th-century Mongolian horse courier immediately proved more hardcore than anything Death Stranding 2 could offer” Read

IGN Germany: “Finally a good video game about horses? Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori fulfills deep-seated wants” Read

PC Gamer: “[…] the most detailed steed mechanics I've ever seen – Be right back taking a quick course on horse genetics.” Read

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[h2]Community Contests[/h2]
We’ve recently ran a handful of community contests on our Discord, and we could not be happier with the results. Over the past weeks, we’ve asked you to participate in a scavenger hunt within our Demo, and asked you to draw fan art of our main character Naraa. You have absolutely delivered! To celebrate our wonderful players and fans, we want to highlight some of your submissions for the recent fan art contest that took place in our community. We are legitimately in awe of the skill and creativity you’ve shown us here.

Finalist: Contest Entry by ampule

Finalist: Contest Entry by Claudia1103#

Winner: Contest Entry by agentequus

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[h2]A Heartfelt THANK YOU[/h2]

These dev diaries are usually about us and what we’re doing, but we want to dedicate this one to you, our players, followers, backers and supporters. Thank you for being an incredibly patient and lovely bunch of people and for keeping up your incredible energy despite some delays on our end. We see you all advocating for our game, creating social media content and fan art, and recommending our game in countless reddit threads at every opportunity. You are the best ambassadors we could hope for, helping us spread the word about this unique thing we’re making into the wider gaming world. Please know that every single one of you is appreciated, and that we do not take your support, your kindness or your patience for granted.

Many, many thanks for joining us on this wild ride ❤

[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]#14 | News about Game’s Title, Languages & Alpha Playtest Survey[/p]
• [p] #15 | Breeding in our Demo, Performance Considerations & More[/p]
• [p]#16 | Our Updated Roadmap to Early Access[/p]

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

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]

Dear Couriers,

It’s time for another dev diary, and today we want to give you a bit more insight into what we’ll spend the next few months doing. As you’ve probably heard by now, we’ve decided to delay our Early Access release from November 4th, 2025 to March 3rd, 2026, so today let us give you more detail on where that extra work time is going.

The priorities we set ourselves are about adding new features as well as polishing what’s already there! A lot of the work we’ll be doing might well be invisible to players, since it’s the kinds of thing that leave a negative impression when done badly, but don’t necessarily stand out as a positive when working well.

And you might see new additions that we haven’t talked about yet on top of the below.

[h2]Guidance and Controls[/h2]
Camera and Controls are and remain huge topics for us: From the very start of this game’s development in early 2023, we knew we wanted to nail down “CCC” (that’s Camera, Controls and Character) as soon as possible… and then we ended up revisiting it across several playtests anyway! This is a crucial and complex part of the game, and it therefore has required quite a bit of iteration, and it still does. We want the controls to be easy to pickup without adding unnecessary friction, but also offer the kind of depth and variety that horse game fans love, like extending and collecting your gaits. We’re trying to span the width of preferences people have for controls by giving you a lot of options to customize your game experience.

We’re incorporating a lot of feedback we’ve had from our players from the Demo these past few weeks to improve horse controls and camera. For example, we are adding framing options so you can adjust the camera’s offset and distance from the character, and we’ll give players the option for the horse to stop automatically upon dismounting.

This also means that if you first play the game and you don’t like the controls, please try out different settings! We’re counting on our community to help each other out here as well - though we’re doing our best to provide guidance, experienced players helping new players find the best settings for their preferences can be a wonderful advantage of having such an active community!

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[h2]Performance and Optimization[/h2]
The Legend of Khiimori is a detail-rich game, which makes it quite demanding to run. This is why we’re revisiting our presets for Low and Medium quality in order to improve what the game looks like even on less powerful hardware.

In addition, we are adding notifications and adjusted error messages that will better inform the user about issues impacting their performance. For example, the game will let you know if your hardware is below minimum specs, if your drivers are outdated, or if you have installed the game on your HDD instead of your SSD. We see value in this because — as already covered in our last dev diary — the Demo and the discussion around it has shown us that we are reaching a lot of players for whom those things might not be all that familiar yet, so we do our best to help these people be able to play.

We’ve also added support for all major upscalers (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) and will support frame generation which further should boost performance and to a certain degree also image quality, and further work has gone into reducing hitches when playing the game.

Here too, we realize that players’ preferences vary a lot, so we are adding more settings for graphic features that are subject to personal taste, such as motion blur. In all of these aspects, from visuals to controls, please try out different settings if you’re not happy with the looks or with how some things work and behave.

The diverse landscape of Mongolia

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[h2]World and Design[/h2]
We’re further fleshing out the depth and strategy around route planning: Parts of the map are becoming more challenging to traverse, which means more decisions to make about whether you dare to tackle difficult terrain that demands skillful riding or choose longer but gentler routes to you want to take your time and reduce the risk of injury to your horse.

We’re also updating the resource gathering while riding, inspired by the spectacular real-world ‘Tenge Ilu’ sport in which riders from the steppes hang from their saddles to snatch coins and other items from the ground at high speed. We can only recommend watching some video of it, it’s SO cool.

Also on our to do list for the immediate future: upgrading Yam Network outposts to add useful features such as hay, water and cooking fires, additional crafting recipes and improved balancing for existing ones, and extra mission types for variety and challenge in your life as a courier.

In short: We have a LOT to do! We’re doing our best to juggle urgent player feedback from the demo along our own vision and priorities and we once again thank everyone for your patience as this amazing game project has grown far beyond our initial plans and expectations.

Winter is coming (work in progress)

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[h2]Top 200 Wishlists! [/h2]
We have another nice little bit of exciting news: The Legend of Khiimori is now in the 200 most wishlisted games on Steam!

This number doesn’t come with any benefit, but it is a very clear sign that people want to play this game, and that the audience for a horse riding focused open world game with some crafting and gathering, survival mechanics and delivery missions is quite significant. Thank you all for being here, and for being patient with us 💖



[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]#14 | News about Game’s Title, Languages & Alpha Playtest Survey[/p]
• [p] #15 | Breeding in our Demo, Performance Considerations & More[/p]

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

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]

Dear Couriers, we hope you’ve been having an excellent time with the Demo during Next Fest and beyond! (And if not, remember to send us your feedback on Discord and your bug reports using the F1 key!)

As you’ve probably seen, we’ve decided to keep our Demo live for a while longer, so even if you’ve missed Next Fest or have been too busy with the myriad of other cool upcoming titles, you can still return to The Legend of Khiimori in the coming days.

[h2]Demo Success[/h2]
We’re very pleased and proud to say that the Demo is performed excellently in terms of player numbers! Over 54,000 people played our Demo during Next Fest, which was enough to get TLOK onto Steam’s “Most Played” list for the event. The festival also gave us a noticeable boost in Wishlists, enough to catapult us well over the 200,000 Wishlist threshold. This is absolutely remarkable and wonderful, especially in light of the fact that only a few years ago, some people on our team were repeatedly told that the audience for horse-focused games was just too small and too niche to invest in their development. Well, the audience isn’t looking so small now!


For all the celebration, we’re of course also aware that the Demo has showed some of our players the various issues that our game still has, from technical reliability to performance, to player guidance to other design issues. Hence, our decision to delay the game by a few months to March 2026, more on that here. Thank you all for being so understanding about that announcement! We know many of you would love to get the finished game right now, but we’re very relieved that our community mostly seems on board with giving the game a bit more time in the oven to improve on those aforementioned issues.

[h2]Demo Insight: Please Adjust Your Graphics Settings![/h2]
We’ve had one very interesting insight thanks to our in-game analytics: it turns out about 70% of players who tried the Demo are playing on hardware below the minimum requirements. We see the need for further optimization here, and will put further work into trying to make the game as accessible as possible to folks without the latest gaming rig.

But even more interestingly, we noticed that many of our players have their graphics set to “High” or “Ultra”. What this tells us is that there is a significant overlap here of players who play on very high settings despite not having the minimum hardware capacity. We can only speculate as to why this is the case, but we see in our community that our game is reaching a lot of passionate players who don’t otherwise play many games on PC and therefore might simply not be aware of the options. Therefore, please note that if your game is stuttering or lagging, please head to the Graphics Settings and Change your Quality Preset to Low or Medium.

Under the “Show Advanced” tab, you can then tweak individual aspects of the quality settings to experiment with what matters to you and what makes a noticeable difference on your computer. If you’ve been experiencing lag, we recommend starting with the lowest preset and then trying to gradually increase different effects in order to find out what works for you.


Note that we still very much want to make improvements on our end and are considering solutions for better presets and explanations. But for now, while the demo stays available, please try if you can improve your experience by trying different settings!

And as an aside, we think it’s actually really cool that our game is apparently reaching people who might not even play many PC games otherwise. We love that The Legend of Khiimori is broadening those horizons!

[h2]Demo Tips: Try Breeding Horses![/h2]
We know that the Demo’s time limit isn’t making it easy for people to play around with more long-term features such as Breeding. Fortunately though, you can replay the Demo as often as you like, and Steam Community User Gooseberry has put together a very helpful guide on how to to reach the breeding mechanics in a short amount of time.

As for why you should give it a try: we know we don’t have to explain this to the hardcore horse fans out there, who have already enjoyed our horse color genetics info dumping, but if you’re new in the horse game space, let’s put this into more widely accessible terms:

Breeding horses in The Legend of Khiimori is a little bit like your skill tree in an RPG. You invest gameplay time into training your horses (i.e. “levelling up”) and then instead of investing experience directly into skills, you breed those horses to get new foals with higher maximum stats and different traits.


This isn’t a linear process where one horse is always better than the other either: you might get one horse specialized in cold resistance for a trip to the mountains, and need another horse that’s particularly fast for a time-sensitive mission. In the demo, we give players a cold-resistant horse early on in order to let you see more of the gameplay and world quickly, but in the final game breeding for those specialized skillsets will require an effort of gathering, crafting, (eventually!) taming wild horses and combining your most valuable bloodlines for even more talented foals!

Think of the horses in your stable as you would the weapons in your arsenal or the cars in your garage in other games. Not every horse is suited for every job, so you want to build up a diverse lineup over time in order to weather any challenge your courier duties confront you with.

And of course, the foals are just so dang cute!

Have you tried breeding horses in the demo yet? We’d love to hear from you! As always, make sure to use the ingame bug reporter by pressing F1, or come join our Discord to let us know your detailed feedback and wishes for the game.

[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]#14 | News about Game’s Title, Languages & Alpha Playtest Survey[/p]

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

Discord Twitch YouTube Website[/p]

Time to phone Genghis Khan. Tell him the news. There's gonna be a bit more waiting before you can become 13th century Mongolia's truest Yam courier rider/horse befriender. Following its latest Steam Next Fest demo, The Legend of Khiimori's early access release has been pushed back to March next year.

I know, throw down your spurs like they're Yosemite Sam's hat. There's neigh way developers Aesir Interactive and NightinGames have done this to you. Well, they have, but they say they've got the game's best interests at heart.

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