The Hidden Ones Pre-Alpha Playtest Delayed to February

Morefun Studios announced that pre-alpha playtesting for The Hidden Ones will be postponed to February 27, 2025. The announcement was posted on The Hidden Ones official website, Discord server, and its social media pages. Ultimately, the decision comes from community feedback across various social media platforms, media response, and gameplay preview event participants.

Originally, the pre-alpha playtest was scheduled for January 7, 2025. The development team cited internal and external factors in its decision-making process, resulting in three main focus points: localization, tutorials, and overall quality.

Localization

The game will be released worldwide, with a focus on audiences across North America, South America, and Europe. Though it is unknown how many languages will be dubbed, The Hidden Ones has English voice acting. While the script itself is good, there are inconsistencies in-game with the subtitles and lip flaps (matching the audio to the characters’ mouth movements). Out of the two, the subtitles require the most attention as words may be missing, sentences may be incorrect, or the subtitles reflect a different version of the script. However, the subtitles always reflect the gist of what’s going on.

Despite that, the team wants to ensure that each localized version of the game will be able to accurately and successfully convey the overall lore of The Hidden Ones. Though the game has an original story, the world of The Outcast has been around for years. With the knowledge that a majority of players may not know the full lore of The Outcast, the game needs to explain that history.

New Tutorials

RELATED: The Hidden Ones Hands-On Preview: An Intuitive Fighting Game for PC and Mobile

The development team shared a message as part of the postponement announcement to further explain the delay.

“We want to review and revamp our new introduction process to help players better understand the game mechanics and begin to master the combat,” the announcement said.

From experience, the combat is fantastic and has few issues with its implementation. However, the intricacies of combat are difficult to explain in a written format. Most likely, the team will create tutorials for each aspect of combat – basic attack, skills, ultimates, blocking, dodging, and interrupting – and take time to build on each concept. It’s a lot like rock, paper, scissors, but with some added flavor.

Overall Quality

Finally, the team wants to focus on the “content quality.” Most likely, they will be focusing on the game’s environments and immersion rather than the gameplay and characters. So much care and attention to detail has gone into animating the characters’ fighting animations. Each character uses a specific martial art, such as Kung Fu and Tai Chi, that were animated through motion capture.

However, there is a disconnect between the combat gameplay and the story campaign. The one map available to preview utilized a lot of invisible walls in obvious ways. In the age of huge open-world games that aim to immerse its players, the invisible walls strictly keeping a character on a road and off the curbs does feel disruptive.

Hopefully, there will be more opportunities to explore the game environments beyond sticking to a single path, like being able to go into buildings or incentives for returning to previous areas. However, it’s far too early to tell at this point.

Ultimately, the development team aims to deliver a product that they are proud of. The announcement closed with the following:

“We sincerely apologize for postponing the pre-alpha playtest. We want to practice the essential spirit of The Hidden Ones: attention to detail with years of practice is one of the keys in becoming a Martial Arts Master,” the announcement said. “With that said, we want to make our first official appearance among the players community displaying this spirit through a mind-blowing and fulfilling experience even in pre-alpha – worthy of the 2-year wait since our first tease of the game.”